Was looking at the status indicator of sleep for certain drives and wanted to confirm if this was a sleep state that say windows induces through its power save feature (with spindle spin down) or if it could possibly be a sleep state that the HDD initiates on it's own like a WD green drive might do.
I'm wanting to confirm that the spindles are actually spinning down and wondering if this HDD Sentinel indicator of Sleep status actually means they are spun down or if they could possibly be in some intermediate standby state with spindles still powered up.
I believe a windows induced sleep state will infact power down the spindles but dont believe the drive does it on it's own is why I'm asking.
Thanks.
Sleep status indicator meaning
-
hdsentinel
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3128
- Joined: 2008.07.27. 17:00
- Location: Hungary
- Contact:
Re: Sleep status indicator meaning
Yes, I can confirm that some devices (for example external hard disk drives) may have their own power management function which works completely independent from the Windows power management settings. For example, they may spin down even if power management is disabled in Windows.
Hard Disk Sentinel has different methods for both internal / external hard disks to get the actual power mode (sleeping / active) of the hard disk itself.
In some cases, this is limited to the information provided by the hard disk controller (or more precisely, its driver) - but for most devices, Hard Disk Sentinel can communicate with the hard disk drive itself and detect the real power state, to verify if the drive is actually sleeping. If so, Hard Disk Sentinel does not "wake" up the drive of course just to detect the status of the hard disk on the next detection cycle.
Hard Disk Sentinel has different methods for both internal / external hard disks to get the actual power mode (sleeping / active) of the hard disk itself.
In some cases, this is limited to the information provided by the hard disk controller (or more precisely, its driver) - but for most devices, Hard Disk Sentinel can communicate with the hard disk drive itself and detect the real power state, to verify if the drive is actually sleeping. If so, Hard Disk Sentinel does not "wake" up the drive of course just to detect the status of the hard disk on the next detection cycle.
Re: Sleep status indicator meaning
Hi, if the hard disk is not sleeping but "heads parking", does Sentinel "unpark" the heads by just looking at the drive? I think my "load/unload cycle" is extremely crowing up since i installed Sentinel.hdsentinel wrote:... Hard Disk Sentinel does not "wake" up the drive of course just to detect the status of the hard disk on the next detection cycle.
-
hdsentinel
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3128
- Joined: 2008.07.27. 17:00
- Location: Hungary
- Contact:
Re: Sleep status indicator meaning
Yes of course: periodically reading and detecting the hard disk status information (just like any read command) causes that the hard disk heads go back to the data area from the parking zone.
As this happens once per every 5 minutes by default, it does not really cause too much parking/unparking, but if you prefer to stop increasing the load/unload cycle count, it is possible to
- on Configuration -> Advanced options page: adjust Detection frequency option to detect the status less frequently (eg. once per hour only)
OR
- at Configuration -> Disk Control page: set a * in the "Do not allow spin down of disks" field - as this cause that the hard disk heads will not enter to the parking zone, causing the drive to operate more quickly (no need to wait to leave the parking zone on access).
As this happens once per every 5 minutes by default, it does not really cause too much parking/unparking, but if you prefer to stop increasing the load/unload cycle count, it is possible to
- on Configuration -> Advanced options page: adjust Detection frequency option to detect the status less frequently (eg. once per hour only)
OR
- at Configuration -> Disk Control page: set a * in the "Do not allow spin down of disks" field - as this cause that the hard disk heads will not enter to the parking zone, causing the drive to operate more quickly (no need to wait to leave the parking zone on access).