wddriveservice.exe is working hard, eating CPU cycles, for no apparent reason. I’m seeing this on Process Explorer (Sysinternals). I’ve read that “wddriveservice.exe” can be malware (I.e. malware can be named “wddriveservice.exe”) and I’m puzzled to see:
Current Directory:
c:/Windows/System32
Apparently, I can just uninstall, but I’d like to know what’s going on here, and whether there’s some better alternative.
Thanks for any help.
I found the same thing this morning - Oct 29… with WDDriveService.exe using up similar resources as the SmartWare program.
I turned off, disconnected the external drive, and restarted. Both programs started again - with WDDS running for about an hour, after which it went away.
Hopefully a one-off, and perhaps it was actually “doing” something? Will report back if it reappears.
Seems that, whatever it was doing, that has indeed ended - with the DriveService program now only using tiny amounts of memory and CPU activity.
[Peter_Norwich]: Thanks for taking a look.
My WD drive is internal, so turning it off isn’t an easy option. The excessive (seemingly) use of CPU time is intermittent. If I reboot the problem seems to go away, but then later it will be back. Since I generally leave my computer on 24/7(re-booting intermittently), it feels like WDDriveService.exe is waiting until I’m not watching before doing … whatever.
Anybody know if there’s a problem just uninstalling it?
One site said, " The process is a service, and the service name is WDDriveService** . The service provides discovery of WD Drives. The program is not visible." My WD drive is my D: drive. I don’t need some program constantly looking for it.
With trepidation, after doing further research and creating a system restore point, I uninstalled. I cannot find that anything has changed, except that I no longer see WDDriveService.exe eating up CPU cycles.
I had worried that I actually had some malware masquerading as WDDriveService.exe while participating in a botnet, etc., but apparently not. I also ran a 2nd scan, using Malware Bytes (in addition to my Norton security), but no malware was found.
