Surface test prevents display from turning off

[pimjoosten]

I recently noticed that when performing a surface scan on one or more disk drives, the time set under Power options for when the display should be turned off (or dimmed) does not work anymore. The display is never turned off, which is a problem if (as in many cases) the scan lasts a long time (several days). It only happens when the surface scan is being performed, when I stop it the power options again work as they should.

I have observed this in HDS v5.40 portable and v5.50 portable, with both Windows 7 x86 and Windows 10 v1809 x64.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message. I'm afraid there is no "fix" for it - as it is not a bug or problem.

Exactly the opposite: it is completely normal and expected behaviour: exactly to prevent
- spin down of hard disk
- the system entering standby mode
during the disk test, Hard Disk Sentinel keeps awake.

Yes, as side effect, the screen can also do not switch off. I'm afraid there is no real Windows function which can prevent disk spin down (and standby) but allowing the screen to turn off.

I'd be happy to find a solution, but until now, I found no way to allow screen turning off (and remain off) while the others can be prevented.

Maybe it is possible to turn OFF the display adapter....

[pimjoosten]

Hello Janos,

Thank you for your fast reply. I had indeed just discovered in the help text that "the software prevents the screensaver from starting, prevents the computer entering any standby or lower power management mode and using a higher priority." I was just about to add that and request the option to be able to turn the display off, but I understand from your response that it is not possible to have the display turn off.

On this particular laptop I am using for the scans it is unfortunately not possible to turn off the display separately. Another laptop I have does have this option using [Fn + B], but I need to use it on a daily basis and therefore cannot use it for a (long) surface test. My solution for now is to connect an external monitor and switch Windows to that monitor, which I can then switch off using the power button. A little bit of a hassle, but it does the job.

Maybe it is a good idea to add in the help text that because of the necessity to keep the disk spinning and the computer awake the screen also does not turn off. Also, the help text states that the process runs with high priority (as in my quote above). But when I check Task manager I do not see any HDS component running above Standard priority. Has this been changed and/or is this an error in the help text?

Best regards,

Pim

[hdsentinel]

Yes, I forgot to mention that it's described in the Help

The priority of the disk surface test is automatically adjusted - when required, may not always happen, it is normal.

[AndreLoco]

Hi, sorry for bringing this thread from the dead, but I thought it was better than creating a new one.

I recently found in PowerToys app module for keeping PC awake while the screen doesn't need to be on.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/awake

Maybe something like this can be implemented in Sentinel. Would be great not to have to manually power off the monitor. OLED and QD-OLED monitors don't like concurrent static images for very long periods. Power consumption is the second argument.

[SecCon]

While that is true about leaving monitors on, you can trigger a screensaver to prevent burn-in by clicking on the "Preview" button in the ScreenSaver controls. It would of course entail not touching the computers input devices, but it works.