Frequently Asked Questions

No hard disk temperature/health displayed. What is wrong?
Why no disk information detected for my RAID array?
Why hard disk temperature is so important?
Which S.M.A.R.T. parameters are significant?
How Hard Disk Sentinel warns me if there is a problem?
What languages are supported?
I'm a system administrator. Is it possible to detect hard disk status of a remote computer?
Is it possible to monitor disk status WITHOUT administrator rights?
I can't see the hard disk status on my drive icons. What can I do?
I encountered problem with Hard Disk Sentinel. What can I do?
No Performance information displayed. What is wrong?
I have bad sectors and my disk health is 90%. Do I need to worry or ask for replacement drive?
The disk health is low. What should I do to fix the problems?

Do you have other questions? Just let us know!

No hard disk temperature/health displayed. What is wrong?

The problem is related to the actual hardware (hard disk controller, external enclosure, port multiplier, etc) or its driver which may block the detection.

Updating the driver of the disk controller (if there is an updated version available) may help in this situation. If possible, you may try a different version of Windows because of the different driver sets.
This problem is more frequent if the hard disk controller driver is supplied during Windows installation (these drivers usually support only minimal features but not detecting details).

The issue is usually related to:

• RAID arrays: only some RAID controllers allow detection of disk information, these are listed in the "RAID controllers" section. Other RAID controllers prevents detection of disk information.
• USB hard disks: most newer USB-ATA bridge chips used in USB enclosures supports the detection. Older chips (and early production of USB 3.0 chips, manufactured before Feb 2010) do not have the required function, that's why no hard disk information is displayed.
  It is recommended to connect both ends of the Y USB cable when using 2.5" USB drives to supply enough power to the disk.
• Silicon Image, ITE controllers: these controllers usually provide disk information but only when non-RAID (ATA/ATAPI) firmware and driver set is used.
• JMicron JMB36X, Gigabyte GBB36X controllers: these controllers usually provide disk information but only with specific driver version. Please check the disk controller compatibility page for information about the recommended drivers.
• AMD AHCI controller: according the official response from AMD, drivers of this controller will not allow detection of disk information. Using Microsoft (generic) AHCI driver may allow detection of disk details.
• AHCI controllers: some AHCI controllers may not provide disk information. Disabling AHCI mode in BIOS setup can help in this situation.
• Older hard disks: they may do not support S.M.A.R.T. function which collects and reports the information to the software.
• Solid State Devices: most solid state devices provide health status but only few of them has temperature sensors. It is possible that SSDs provide limited information (for example no temperature and/or power on time value reported).
• Pendrives, memory cards: these devices appear as hard disks in Windows and in Hard Disk Sentinel. However, only very few of them provides any health, temperature information.
• IDE hard disks: make sure to not use "cable select" jumper settings, just "master" or "slave" on the drives. (even if the disk is used in USB enclosure or with PATA/SATA converter). Use 80-wire standard cable (not round one) and the "longer" end should be connected to the motherboard, the shorter end to the master device and the center connector should be to the slave device.

In such situations, please try the recommended solutions (upgrading driver, firmware or using alternative USB enclosure if possible). You may use the Report menu Send test report to developer function to send a report about the current configuration and situation. Such reports help to analyse hardware information and verify why the information is not displayed and helps to improve the detection (if possible).

Alternatively, you may try the HDSDOS (Hard Disk Sentinel for DOS) tool, it may detect some information because under DOS there is no problematic Windows drivers loaded.

Please check the hardware compatibility page for more details.

Anyway, the tests under File menu Surface Test function can be used to test and diagnose the hard disk, reveal and repair possible disk problems.

Why no disk information detected for my RAID array?

Most RAID controllers do not provide access to the hard disks inside the arrays. The controller completely hides all physical disk information - that's why the real disk type and S.M.A.R.T. information (including temperature and health) are not displayed for hardware RAID arrays, regardless of the type (0, 1, etc...) of the array.

Some special RAID controllers, which are listed in the RAID controllers section on the hard disk controllers page (for example 3ware / AMCC / Areca / HighPoint / LSI / Dell / NVIDIA controllers) have a special function which allows to get more information compared to other RAID controllers. But other controllers (ITE, Promise, Adaptec, Intel, JMicron, Silicon Image, etc...) do not have this feature, that's why no information is displayed.

We do our best to examine other RAID controllers and support them, if possible - but most controllers (especially cheaper and integrated ones) do not allow this and can't be supported.

A possible solution is to use a completely OS controlled software RAID array. This way the disks provide full information without problems. It is officially possible by using "Server" editions of Windows.

Anyway, the disk testing functions (File -> Surface test and Random seek test) can be used on all storage volumes, including on such RAID arrays.

Why hard disk temperature is so important?

High speed hard disks, small and crowded chassis can cause very high temperatures. This means that the hard disk is not able to cool down. Disk performance and reliability significantly decrease as temperature increases and above 50 °C failure can occur any time. Disk manufacturers often limit the maximum operating temperature to 50 degree centigrade. However, it is recommended to keep your hard disks at lower temperature (approximately 35-40 °C is good) to increase their life time.

Which S.M.A.R.T. parameters are significant?

Not all hard disk support all such S.M.A.R.T. parameters, but here is the list of most significant values:

• 1 Raw Read Error Rate: Number of hardware read errors occured when reading from the disk surface. Wrong surface or reading head condition may affect this value.

• 5 Reallocated Sectors Count: If the hard disk found an error, it tries to reallocate the data to a new, spare location and mark the original sector as reallocated to prevent further usage. This value is the number of such reallocated sectors.

• 7 Seek Error Rate: Errors found while the head(s) were seeking to a specific sector. This value indicates if there is a head positioning unit (servo) problem.

• 9 Power On Time: The number of minutes or hours (depends of the manufacturer of the disk) the drive is powered. This value is constantly increasing as "total km" counter in cars.

• 10 Spin Retry Count: Hard disk could not spin up when the computer is powered and it needed to retry. Increasing this value is a possible sign of a faulty motor.

• 194 Disk Temperature: The temperature of the disk in °C units. Some models store different values for the disk and the electric board. Some models store not only current but maximum temperature reached also.

• 196 Reallocation Event Count: Number of reallocation operations started. This indicates both completed or failed reallocation operations.

• 197 Current Pending Sector Count: Number of "weak" sectors waiting for reallocation. When the reallocation completed, this value may decrease.

• 198 Uncorrectable Sector Count: Number of uncorrectable errors. This is one of the most important values, it indicates the total number of unusable sectors. Increasing this value means that hard disk failure will be occured.

• 200 Write Error Rate: Number of errors found during write operations to the disk surface.

These are the most important values. Some others indicate statistical informations but some may be used for prediction of the hard disk status (for example, increasing hard disk spin up time or spin retry count may indicate problems as the hard disk can't start easily). For the complete list of parameters, please see the help.

How Hard Disk Sentinel warns me in case of a problem?

Without any special setting, the tray icon immediately reflects the problem by flashing a red X icon. Hard Disk Sentinel displays a tray icon bubble with the error and the hard disk. Optionally it is possible configure e-mail and/or network message alerts, sound warnings and the software can turn off the computer to prevent further degradation. The Professional version can also execute any external application or start a (backup) operation immediately, for example to backup data immediately from the failing drive to an other.

The drive icons displayed in any application (for example, Windows Explorer) reflect the disk health status and free space of the drive.

If the small status window is visible, the error of the problemmatic hard disk is displayed there. You can check the details by inspecting the details and the full S.M.A.R.T. information table for the hard disk. The error is also logged into the log of the hard disk.

Bubble over the system tray icon showing the problem


The hard disk with problem is displayed also in small status window

What languages are supported?

Currently more than 10 different languages are supported (Bulgarian, Czech, English, Hungarian, Italian, French, Romanian, Russian, German, Chinese, Chinese (traditional), Spanish, Portuguese-Brazil, Dutch, Greek) languages are supported. To download the newest language files, please check the language support webpage.

I'm a system administrator. Is it possible to detect hard disk status of a remote computer?

It is possible to configure Hard Disk Sentinel to send e-mail and/or network message if a failure predicted, if a hard disk is too hot or if a critical SMART parameter is degraded. Also it can be used to send daily reports about the current status of hard disks. So (under the licensing conditions) it is possible to install Hard Disk Sentinel on more computers and the comuters report the problems to system administrator.

This requires the registered and activated version of Hard Disk Sentinel installed on the remote computer(s).

If you want to remotely monitor a single client, you can use the "webstatus" feature of the software, to remotely log in by using any web browser.

For larger networks, Hard Disk Sentinel Enterprise Server, is the best solution which can manage many clients, display their details, logs and problems and issue alerts upon problem with any client.

Is it possible to monitor disk status WITHOUT administrator rights?

Yes, it is possible: Hard Disk Sentinel can run as a service: examine hard disk status and make alerts even if there is no user logged to the computer or if the user does not have administrator rights. The administrator rights only required to configure and install the service.

I can't see the hard disk status on my drive icons. What can I do?

Please enable "Modify default hard disk icons" on the Configuration, Disk Control panel. If you use Windows XP, you may need to upgrade to SP2 to view the disk status on icons.

I encountered problem with Hard Disk Sentinel. What can I do?

Please try to use the latest available version. If you encounter problem with it, please download an older version and verify if you experience the same problem.

You can try starting Hard Disk Sentinel by using HDSentinel.exe /REPORT
This will create a HDSentinel_XXXX_report.txt file (where xxxx is the version number you started). Please send us this file and the description of the problem.

No Performance information displayed. What is wrong?

The performance information is based on the Performance Counter objects of Windows (2000/XP/2003/Vista) systems. Hard Disk Sentinel reads these counters and displays performance information based on them. Hard Disk Sentinel has no control on these counters, how they work because they are controlled by Windows itself.

The operating system assigns performance counters to hard disks while booting. So if the disk is an external one and connected later (after Windows completed the booting sequence), the performance monitoring may not be possible.

If the performance information is missing for ALL disks, then disk performance monitoring is globally disabled. Please click Start -> Run -> CMD.EXE (to open a console window) and type diskperf -y (ENTER). You may need to restart the computer to let Windows create the performance counter objects on startup.

If the above command does not help, please try the following:

• Click Start -> Run -> Regedit

• navigate to the following subkey:
  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Perfdisk\Performance

• If there is a value called Disable Performance Counters listed there, and it has a numerical value of one (1), just change it to zero (0), and reboot.

The full procedure is available at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998009.aspx

If the above does not work, you can manually try to verify if the operating system detects the performance values. To do this, please start the performance monitoring tool from Microsoft:
Click Start -> Run and type "Perfmon".
On the bottom right side of the window (under the graphs) you can see a list of currently displayed performance counters. Please click on them and press "DEL" button to remove all.
Then above this space (on the empty graph) please right click and select "Add Counters"
Under "Performance Objects" please select "PhysicalDisk"
Under "Select counters from list" please select "% Disk Time" (or "Disk Bytes/Sec" - these two counters are displayed in Hard Disk Sentinel).
Under "Select instances from list" please select instances for your drives (eg. "0 C:") or select all.
Click on "Add" and then "Close".

Now you should see how the values are changing for the selected hard disks. Please copy or move some files to see how the graphs are changing, reflecting the actual disk usage or the transfer rate. You can compare the values displayed here and in Hard Disk Sentinel. These should be nearly the same (some differences is possible because of the different sampling times).

Here are more details about re-building performance counter objects of Windows. In case of a trouble (no performance information displayed), please check the following pages:

How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values
    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;300956&Product=winsvr2003

How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values
    http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=300956

Some of my Performance Counters are missing. How can I reload them?
    http://support.theplanet.com/knowledgebase/users/kb.php?id=10089

perfmon counters are corrupted
    http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=61336

I have bad sectors and my disk health is 90%. Do I need to worry or ask for replacement drive?

It is important to know that any small, microscopic scratch or dust can cause some bad sectors on the disk surface. It is hard to avoid all of these problems and it is possible that the drive is not 100% perfect, but the health is still "excellent", so you do not need to worry about these sectors.

Especially, because these sectors are not used any more: the hard disk reallocated them and all read and write operations are redirected to the spare area instead.

The problem would start only when the number of these sectors increase (decreasing the health value of the disk).

Hard Disk Sentinel is the only software which is sensitive enough to detect the real number of problems and give textual description based on the real status of the hard disk.

The important thing is that it can detect any slight decrease in the health. For example, you can be alerted and can verify any (even very small) problems occured with your hard disk - otherwise such problems may not be noticed, until the disk failure appears.

Please press F1 in the software to open the help and select "Appendix -> Text description" for more information. You can find the same information at: http://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en

If you are interested, please check the article about how SMART works: http://www.hdsentinel.com/smart
You can read about the problems with original SMART feautre of the disk drives, and a possible solution built into Hard Disk Sentinel. The example also shows the importance of being notified about all disk problems to prevent data loss and costly data recovery.

You should not ask your vendor for replacement drive in this situation. Hard disk manufacturers define different methods to verify when a hard disk should be replaced in terms of warranty: when they have "enough" problems (not only bad sectors) to reach a specified threshold. At this time, the hard disk has usually serious problems and may be seriously damaged which prevents data recovery. At this time, Hard Disk Sentinel displays 0 % health. You can ask for replacement hard disk only when the hard disk health is 0 %.

The disk health is low. What should I do to fix the problems?

The low health is displayed because of the numerous problems detected and reported in the text description field for this hard disk. It is recommended to click on the "?" button next to this field as it describes the current situation and tell more information about what are the next steps. If you prefer, you can read it online at http://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/text_description.html

It is recommended an immediate backup of all stored data to an other hard disk prior any diagnostics.

In this situation, the most important is to verify if the disk status is stable (regardless of the health %) or if there are further problems which may not be revealed yet. This determines if the drive can still be used or if replace is required (warranty replacement is possible at 0% health, when the number of problems reach the threshold specified by the manufacturer).

It is recommended to use the tests in the File menu. First of all, try File -> short self test which generally checks disk components (heads, servo, internal memory, etc.). It may quickly report problem but it is possible that it completes without problems - as this test does not scan the disk surface. The next step is to use the File -> Extended Self-test option which is a hardware test with complete surface verification. If this completes without error, the disk surface seems to stable at the moment. However, it is expected that it will report an error at some point of the test and will stop.

If this happes, the File -> Surface Test option should be used. This contains different test steps which run in controlled and managed environment. For the first time, it is best to use the READ test. This may not fix possible issues but may reveal the amount and the seriousness of errors. If this completes without error (all data blocks will be green as on this image, then the disk already fixed all problems and it is safe to use it in the future.

However, if yellow and/or red spots (example image) or even larger areas (example image, example image) are affected, there are further problems expected which cause data loss.

These areas can only be analysed and fixed by WRITE tests. The best method is to use the File -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface which Overwrites the disk surface with special initialization pattern to restore the sectors to default (empty) status and reads back sector contents, to verify if they are accessible and consistent. Forces the analysis of any weak sectors and verifies any hidden problems and fixes them by reallocation of bad sectors (this is drive regeneration).

Because of its nature (overwrites all information) it cannot be used on primary (system) drive, only on secondary drive, for example on a drive used in external USB enclosure.

If you select File -> Surface test option and you can read the details of all such tests and how they affect stored data (read only or overwrite/delete all stored data).

To summarize, the following steps are the best to detect and repair disk problems:
1) File -> Short self test
2) File -> Extended self test
3) File -> Surface test -> Read test
4) File -> Surface test -> Reinitialise disk surface

Further tests are possible to verify disk stability, noise and temperature levels (random seek test) or File -> Surface test -> Refresh data area which is useful for other devices (eg. SSDs and pendrives) to prevent "forget" effect of memory cells.

For more information, please check the Help -> Hard disk tests topic by F1 or online at http://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en, also in F.A.Q.: http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#q13