WDDriveService.exe: eating cpu process & excess Internet usage

WDDriveService.exe is working hard, eating CPU cycles and accessing the Internet for no apparent reason.

I’m seeing this on Process Explorer (Sysinternals). (2 pics attached)

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

There is no wddriveservice.exe in that folder.

Also, wddriveservice.exe seems to be weirdly active with Internet access. (See pic, below)

Apparently, I can just uninstall, but I’d like to know what’s going on here, and whether there’s some better alternative to uninstalling.

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.

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 and chatting about it over the Internet.

I posted about this in the Western Digital forum, and didn't get what I need, so sending this out to StackExchange.

Thanks for any help.

P.s. I don’t think my WDDriveService.exe concern is likely based on my rig’s hardware, but I just have the feeling that if I don’t include it, somebody will say they need it, so here ‘tis -- [Speccy]

Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

CPU – Intel Core i7 7700 @ 3.60GHz 39 °C – Kaby Lake 14nm Technology

RAM – 32.0GB

Motherboard – Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. Z390 AORUS ULTRA-CF (U3E1) 31 °C

Graphics – BenQ XL2420TX (1920x1080@120Hz)

047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (ZOTAC International) 45 °C

Storage –

9314GB Western Digital WDC WD102KRYZ-01A5AB0 (SATA ) 48 °C –

931GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB (SATA (SSD)) 32 °C –

7452GB Seagate Backup+ Hub WH SCSI Disk Device (USB (SATA) ) 49 °C

Optical Drives – HL-DT-ST BDDVDRW UH12NS30 – HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH16NS40

Audio – Realtek High Definition Audio

Peripherals

Mouse Razer DeathAdder V2

Printers

Fax - HP Officejet Pro 8620

HP Officejet Pro 8620

ScanSnap S1500

Smart Label Printer 450

Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K90 Note: Speccy says keyboard is Razer!

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3 Answers

You wrote:

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 experience

I am using WD hard drives for over 10 years on Windows XP and Windows 7. They never needed anything called "WDDriveService". The operating system is able to detect them without any additional help of software from Western Digital Corporation.

Once I purchased an external drive solution containing a WD drive in an enclosure called "WD my passport Ultra" XP was permanently complaining about a missing driver although the drive was working perfectly.

Opening up a ticket with WDC did not provice additional information.

My hint for you

Test your WD drive on another clean machine without this dubious service. You can run h2testw to test if your operating sytem is able to write on the whole drive and read it out thereafter.

If you succeed, remove that piece of software. When being paranoid, you could backup the WD drive in question before.

By naked drives and put them in an enclosure of your choice when running them externally. Do not buy combos.

Consider uploading the dubious exe file to virustotal.com.

This is follow-up information, that may be helpful to anybody looking at this with the same problem.

After reading r2d3's answer, it seemed likely to me that I had gotten some malware that was using my computer for nefarious Internet activity. Generally I run Norton protection (which, obviously, hadn't found anything wrong), so I downloaded the free Malware Bytes scanner and ran a system check. It found a bunch of entries in my registry about something called PUP.Optional.Reimage, so I did a restore point then let Malware Bytes remove those, then re-booted. WDDriveService.exe was still behaving badly, eating CPU cycles and Internet bandwidth.

Next, I found my Western Digital utility which I assume I installed after I installed my WD HD, probably thinking "hey, it's free, from WD who should know best how to do something good for their hardware, whatever it is doing." So, I ran the program, and got a screen saying something like "Install a compatible hard drive" and seemed to be not recognizing my installed Western Digital HD. Could it be that this program was just constantly searching for a WD HD, failing to find one even though it is installed and having no issues, then repeatedly reporting home to Western Digital that my computer has no Western Digital drive?

So I uninstalled the WD utility, rebooted, and voilà! Everything is working great, and WDDriveService.exe is no longer active. So, I'm giving R2D3 credit for the answer. I'd have added this as a comment to his answer, but comments are limited so I couldn't have given this additional info. I'm leaving this all here, because when I started trying to figure out this problem, I'd have loved to have found this info.

P.s. BTW, I did buy & install my HD naked, so I assume I downloaded this useless utility from the Western Digital website.

I've been using WD external HDs for many years, and had never considered to install any of the utilities that come with the drive. Never had any problem using the drive under Windows (XP, 2000, 7, 10).

Some time ago, I decicded to make use of the "drive encryption feature" [1]. So I needed to install WD Security, and this also installed the WD Driver Service service. And indeed, the WD Drive Service is using quite a bit of CPU for nothing.

To enable drive encryption you run WD Security, and set a drive unlock password. There is no other way, I think, to set, change, or remove the drive unlock password.

Once a password is set, there are three ways to unlock a drive when it is (re)connected to the computer:

1. Start the WD Security program, wait for it to detect the drive, then enter the drive unlock password to unlock the drive. This depends on the WD Drive Service to be started. You can close WD security thereafter; it doesn't have to run to work with the drive.
2. Run the program called Unlock.exe that you find on the virtual CD Drive [2] that pops up when a locked drive is connected. This program can only be used to unlock a drive (entering the password). There is no option to change or remove the password with this program.
3. Not a recommended option IMHO, but at the time you set the password (using WD Security), you can choose to automatically unlock the drive at this computer.

Options 1. needs the WD Security utility which in turn needs the WD Drive Service to be running. Option 3. needs WD Drive Service to be running (I guess; never tried this option). Finally, Option 2 does not depend on any of those, so you can either deinstall WD Security, and WD Drive Service, or, simply set the service to disabled. I recommend the latter, because it is easier to re-enable the service, than to re-install, if you have the need to change, or delete, the password.

HTH

[1] To use the drive encryption feature you need to set a drive unlock password on the drive. This, however, does not change the encryption state of the device! The data on the drive are always encrypted by the drive hardware; you can't switch that off. The difference is only whether the encryption key is password protected or not. There is no password set when the drive leaves the factory, but any data written to it will still be encrypted. There is no change to the data, when you set, change, or remove the unlock password. The password is only used to encrypt/decrypt the drive's internal encryption key.

[2] A drive with a drive unlock passsword set, is not popping up as an HD drive when connected (except when you use option 3 above). Instead, the drive's hardware presents a virtual CD drive to the computer, which you will see, despite the fact that the (HD) drive is still locked, and invisible. The main purpose of this virtual CD drive is to be able to give you access to some software on the (still locked) device. The Unlock.exe being the important one for the discussion at hand. Once unlocked the HD drive will be visible.