HDD Sentinel spins disks up - is there a way do prevent this

[Stefan78]

Hello
I have bought HDD Sentinel Pro, and I'm very happy with it.. except for one point:
I have several disks on my pc, some SSD and some mechanical HDD.
Since I installed HDD Sentinel, it keeps spinning up my HDDs! (which otherwise stay in Spin-Down)
I have already lowered HDD Sentinel Detection Frequency to 12h (maximum allowed) and enabled Automatic detection based on disk utilization but still ... is there a way to prevent constant disk spin-up?
It is a feature that has been already asked in the past,see:
https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23
https://www.hdsentinel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1198


Thanks

[hdsentinel]

Hi!

Thanks for your message and sorry for the troubles.

Not really sure when do you experience spin up? Generally Hard Disk Sentinel only detects the status based on the configured schedule. So if you set (for example) 12 hours, then do you experience spin up in every 12 hours (which could be normal)?

Detection of status information acts as any simple read command, causing that the idle-timer of the hard disk resets. So if the 'hard disk power down' timeout in Windows Power Management is set to higher than the Detection Frequency (on Configuration -> Advanced options page in Hard Disk Sentinel) then the hard disk may never spin down.

If you adjust these options to allow spin down, Hard Disk Sentinel detects if the drive is in sleeping mode and do not wake up the drive(s) just to update the values. Then you may see the "Power state: sleeping" instead of "Power state: active" on the Information page.


> It is a feature that has been already asked in the past,see:

Yes. This is exactly that feature: the "Automatic detection based on disk utilization".
This was required because some hard disks (more precisely the disk controller: motherboard chipset or add-on card, its driver and/or the external enclosure if used) does not provide correct power state: so even if Hard Disk Sentinel attempts to verify if the hard disk is sleeping or not - the disk drive always respond "I'm active". So Hard Disk Sentinel attempted to detect the status (which wakes up the hard disk drive).
The "Automatic detection based on disk utilization" function verifies if there was read/write activity on the disk since last access. If there was no read/write, then Hard Disk Sentinel assumes that the hard disk sleeping - so does not perform the detection, exactly to keep the hard disk sleeping.

Between the detections, Hard Disk Sentinel does not attempt to detect the status, so the disk drives should remain sleeping.
If this is not true, I'm afraid the issue may be related to the mentioned chipset, controller or its driver which may cause the troubles. You can try to update the chipset driver, as in some cases, it may help.

If you use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option, I can check the actual situation, it may give some thoughts.

[hdsentinel]

A tip: it is possible that the verification of the free/used space is causing the disk(s) to spin up.

You can try to open Configuration -> Disk Control page and specify the affected drive letters in the "Do not examine space information of the following disks" section. This way Hard Disk Sentinel will also not try to verify the change of used/free spaces too (which may also cause wake up, even they should not, as that information is usually provided as cached by the OS).

[Stefan78]

at midnight, every night, HDD sentinel spins all the disks:

[hdsentinel]

Yes, it is completely normal and expected behaviour.

At midnight (as the new day starts), Hard Disk Sentinel resets the daily statistics: health, temperature, etc. and to start a new day, it automatically detects fresh values from all hard disk drives.

It is completely normal and it can't be disabled, exactly to maintain proper functionality / status reporting (described in a different forum topic you linked above).

[Stefan78]

My array spins up just when needed, that's how I use it.
Can't please an enhancement be made to have the statistics updated just when there is disk utilization, like for the SMART data?
I've come from spinning the disks once a week to several times a week. I run my pc on solar+battery, and this is draining the battery much faster.
I bought HDD Sentinel pro to solve a problem: i.e. to know if there was a disk issue. Now I solved the disk monitoring issue, but I got a new problem!

[hdsentinel]

Thanks, I see.

It may be possible to do not perform this kind of detection on midnight but that may cause false assumption/false status....
I'll examine the possibilities.

If you do not prefer constant, updated values (at least 1-2 times per day) then maybe a good option would be to make a scheduled script which will
- launch Hard Disk Sentinel as you prefer, for example only 1-2 times per week
- after some time (eg. some minutes) launch
taskkill /IM HDSentinel.exe
to close the software completely. This way it will stop working.

If there would be no status update (for days) then I suspect it may not need to run in the background, just launch when required to get updated status information.

[Stefan78]

Hello
I don't understand why all my posts have to be approved, and my last one did not show up.
Again, I could run smartctl and dump the result to a SQLite database, but that is not the reason why I bought a license of HDD Sentinel PRO.
Can't you please implement a feature that prevents disk spin ups and read the informations when the disk spins up for a needed reason?
I have my system running on solar/batteries, and HDD Sentinel nearly doubled my system consumption.

[hdsentinel]

Hello,

Because PHPBB does not have option to automatically approve all posts of an user.
As "clever" people attempt to post 1000's of spam posts every day, it is required to approve each posts manually. Yes, this may take time and not always possible quickly. Sorry for that.

Generally this is exactly how Hard Disk Sentinel work, but at least once per day it is normal that the disks spin up to get most recent values. This is the "needed reason": to prevent displaying same value (without updates) for many days, as that may cause false assumptions.

I'd like to check the possibilities of making additional changes. This is why I sent you a mail some days ago, as I'd like to know more about your project as then I'd probably understand things and requirements better. I did not receive any response, so not sure if my mail arrived, but I suspect would be better and easier to discuss furhter in e-mail.

[Stefan78]

Hello
I have sent you numerous PMs telling you my private email address but got no reply (neither by PM nor by email)

[hdsentinel]

Hello,

I do not really understand.... I received two PMs from you. Immediately responded for both them after arrived: first on 16 March and then on 27 March.

I sent one e-mail to your address first and then two reminders on 27 March. Exactly to be sure, I sent from two different addresses.
In your PM you wrote "outlook,com" - of course I sent to proper outlook.com address.
Never got back any response or errors or similar.

Maybe if you have a different e-mail, I can send for that too.
Sometimes outlook, yahoo and hotmail addresses simply discard messages regardless of sender/topic/message, they may be not always reliable.