After installing WD Discovery and WD Drive Utilities my My Book just spins endlessly

[XBonet]

I recently bought an 8Tb My Book and had it working fine, except that as I was working it would power down and go to sleep between saves, so that when I went to save my work I had to wait about 10-20 seconds for the drive to power up and get running, which basically put my computer into pause until it was done. So I wanted to be able to extend the time the drive would wait while inactive before powering down; I saw that in order to do this I had to install WD’s software, where I could configure this. I first installed WD Discovery, which is what comes default in the drive itself to install, and then was prompted to install WD Drive Utilities in order to further configure my drive. I did so and finally was able to configure my drive so that it goes to sleep after 30 mins of inactivity… The issue is that now it NEVER goes to sleep. I can leave my computer, not touch it, and the drive just continues spinning. I’ve just watched an entire Netflix movie (a task that obviously has nothing to do with the drive, so it’s idle) and my drive has been spinning throughout.

My instinct tells me it’s WD Discovery–I mean, the name itself makes you think it’s something that “keeps an eye” on your drive, so I assume it keeps it running, at least in a reduced state. So I went ahead and closed all WD processes in the Task Manager and waited some minutes and, lo and behold, for the first time since I installed the WD software I heard the drive power down and have a rest. Of course, it’s now powered back up and is there, “idle”, but humming and making this little “brmm” noise every couple of seconds… so I imagine some WD processes just come back after a while…

As much as it pained me to have to wait for the drive to wake up every time I wanted to save my work, I prefer to have tit go to sleep, thus ensuring it will last me longer! It seems absurd that WD’s proprietary software makes the drive work worse than without it–but do I have to uninstall it to get my drive to go to sleep when idle? (And if so, is there another way I can lengthen it’s sleep time on a Windows 10 computer?)

[striker2k8]

Sorry for being late. Tools like WD Dashboard, WD Drive Utilities etc. will start a background service called Virtual Drive Disk (vds.exe). When you are done and close the tool, the vds.exe process will keep running in background and this is the reason why your drive doesn’t enter the sleep mode. You have to kill this process manually and as far as i remember the start type of this service has been set to “Auto Start” as well, means the process would automatically restart after few minutes

First change the start type back to “Demand start” and then kill the process

The vds.exe will be the most reason but in case that service isn’t running and you are 100% sure there are no files in use, then your drive or better said the sleep on/off switch function is hanging. Unfortunately this can happen with any disk tool, i even had this problem with CrystalDiskInfo. safely USB remove won’t work, you have to unplug the cable or reboot PC.

also with “System Informer” u can check all processes and handles, best way to find and terminate the troublemakers but you should know what you do. Not recommended for beginners

You don’t need to uninstall these tools. As long as they aren’t open, they won’t touch your drive