Will SmartWare work okay if I disable the WDFME service

I like the features of the SmartWare product on my new Passport drive but the WDFME service is such a resource hog on my laptop that it renders the machine almost unusable (consumes 98% of 4Gb RAM and thrashes the hard drive constantly even with the Passport drive disconnected).

I’ve disabled all WD services and startup applications in msconfig.exe so that I can have my laptop back for now but wondered if one option would be to run SmartWare without the WDFME service. I don’t know if anyone from WDC reads these messages (I’ve not seen any evidence of it on any other post!) but if anyone knows the answer it would be good to know if I can avoid simply uninstalling the WD software and going back to RoboCopy…

SmartWare won’t work right if you disable the services.  However, we have released a new version of SmartWare that addresses the issue of excessive resource usage.

grazza wrote: I don’t know if anyone from WDC reads these messages (I’ve not seen any evidence of it on any other post!)

Uhhh… really? In my experience, WD replies to almost every thread on the board- they are amazing in their responses here!

Try updating to the new SmartWare released yesterday - it is supposed to fix most (if not all) of the WDFME resource issues introduced in the last update.

I have been using SmartWare for a few weeks now on my new 2TB WD Book Live drive. Backup is complete and stopped at this time. I have rebooted my computer and the internal hard disk is on steady. Process WDFME.EXE is working hard, and Task Manager reports so far 32,617,500 I/O Writes (growing at 50 per second when SmartWare is running), and 8,064,700 I/O Read. Is this process needed? I don’t want continous activity when I don’t need the external drive. Closest process contender for I/O writes is 10 times less (virus scan).

I beleive I am on the latest version of WD SMartware (v1.5.1.6) but it is still workign flat out (runing on Windows XP).  It hogs one for of my processor and is contunially accessing the drive

7 hours of prcessor time

WDFME.exe Process is consuming 800MBytes (Peaked at 1GByte)

7GBytes of Reads

17Gbytes of writes

4Gytes of other I/O

There should have only been about 300Mbytes of changes to back up but it is hogging the machine.

Is there a later version that fixes the issue ???

Regards

   Nick

We are working on this issue, now.  Hopefully, it will be fixed in the next release.

when do you expect the next release? wdfme is running 24/7 and causing one of my cpu’s to run at 100% all the time because it uses 50%+ all the time. what the **bleep** is that software doing? i am also getting firefox lockups from time to time and i thing there is some relation as i usually have my browser open 24/7.

I understand from the first response that WD has updated WD SmartWare to resolve the issue.  However, I have updated my software (and am using 1.5.1.6), and WDFME.exe still chews up 50 to 60% of my CPU.  Memory use is not bad, but the CPU hit is a killer… 

GeoWiz wrote:

I understand from the first response that WD has updated WD SmartWare to resolve the issue.  However, I have updated my software (and am using 1.5.1.6), and WDFME.exe still chews up 50 to 60% of my CPU.  Memory use is not bad, but the CPU hit is a killer… 

I found that there are alternatives to Smartware if you do not need its security features.  One of them is Genie Timeline and have posted seperately about it.

FWIW, I’m also running the latest version of SmartWare (1.5.1.6) on a quad core Windows 7 Pro machine with 16GB of RAM, connected to a 2TB MyBook Live NAS device. What I’ve noticed is that the WDFME service on my machine gradually grabs more and more RAM until it eventually runs the machine completely out of physical RAM, at which point it begins to swap to disk and performance goes out the window. This happens regardless of whether my machine is connected to the drive or not. Disabling the WDFME service immediately solves the problem, but of course then SmartWare doesn’t function properly.

Please advise when WD will have a fix for this problem, which seems to have been recuring for at least six months for many of the people on this forum. 

i’m on version 1.5.1.6 and it the software constantly hogs the cpu. i have been tempted to stop the process my self, is there a new version of the software that corrects this cpu hog? if so could you please provide a link to the upgrade location.

just wondering who makes the software? i’m guessing the drive and the software are not made by the same people, or are they?

thank you for your time,

kafj302