Western Digital SmartWare fills up your HDD

Thread Starter

JohnInTX

Joined Jun 26, 2012
4,787
Just a heads up..

I unexpectedly ran out of space on my Windows partition and, using the free TreeSize utility found a whoppin' 160GB (yup, gigabytes) of hidden files in the Windows temp directory. Since they are hidden, the standard Windows cleanup utilities won't find them. Un-hid and deleted them manually but a few weeks later, they were building again..

The problem was traced to WD SmartWare 5.xxx.xxx (an auto-backup utility that comes with Passport USB drives and others) making 400-500MB hidden files (presumably some file indexing records) on a daily basis and not deleting them when a new one is created. WD blames Microsoft, Microsoft says WTF??

Version 6.xxx.xxx supposedly fixes the file issue but the early versions spent approx. 100% of the disk channel doing 'something', reducing my fire-breathing I7 to a crawl. I got rid of SmartWare and all is rosy again. The drive itself works fine otherwise.

Here's some info from the WD forum:
http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-Soft...indows-temp-folder/td-p/307856/highlight/true

TreeSize Free
http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/
 
Last edited:
Top