Because I spent so much time trying to track this down and went down so many dead-ends, I want to tell everyone that what caused my very strange #USB behavior on my brand new #Windows 11 system was in fact @WesternDigital Security.
The symptom was that any time there was a lot of data going to or from an external hard drive, I would get USB connectivity dropouts to other devices, including my keyboard, mouse, and sound card. The easiest way to see this was that the keyboard backlight would flash.
I could reproduce this problem easily using winsat disk -drive Z -seq -write; almost every time I could get a keyboard flash and a sound dropout when sending a lot of data to/from the external drive Z (which is NOT a WD drive).
My troubleshooting was briefly thwarted by not being able to get the machine into safe mode with the system drive being a RAID-1; more on that later. Once I could get booted into Safe Mode using msconfig (instead of shift-clicking to restart), the problem went away.
Problems that go away in safe mode: some program, service, or driver is interfering. So I jotted down all the devices that weren't enabled in Safe Mode from the device manager, and in a normal boot, tried disabling those same devices one-by-one. No luck.
Next I uninstalled ESET, my antivirus solution, because I know that hooks into USB events. No luck there. Disabled "protection" in my backup software too. Also no luck.
The most obvious culprits out of the way, I decided to step through all the running services on the machine that were not provided by Microsoft, but that were running as Local System, stopping them and re-running my winsat test after each one.
Lo and behold, after I stopped the "WD Drive Manager" service the problem went away immediately and completely. Just to be certain, because I'd been flipping a lot of bits, I disabled the service and rebooted. The problem stayed gone.
So if you're having strange USB connectivity dropouts that seem to occur when writing or reading a large amount of data to attached USB3 storage on Windows 11, check to see if you have WD Drive Manager in services.msc, and stop the service & disable it if you do.
If you NEED to be able to unlock an encrypted #WD drive later, you can always re-enable the service, start it, plug in your drive, do what you need to do, and then stop & disable it again.
Western Digital, you should feel badly for this. Very, very badly.
Western Digital, you should feel badly for this. Very, very badly.
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