Single tray icon?

[mr-b]

Hi

Would it be possible to have just a single tray icon for HDS that would cover all disks and only flash an alert if configured temp/health etc. thresholds were exceeded? Also the tooltip/hover-help could display all the disks' properties. My tray has become rather busy with lots of numbered HDS icons.

[hdsentinel]

Hi,

Of course there is such option available:
please open Configuration -> Hard Disk Drives and on the bottom (below the list of hard disk drives) enable the "Display only the highest temperature on tray" option.
This will show only the highest hard disk temperature value in a single tray icon.

Alternatively, in the list you can enable/disable any hard disk (by double clicks on the appropriate hard disk) to configure which hard disk should have icon displayed.

[mr-b]

OK tx - I certainly didn't think the tray option would be under disk drives. Naively I'd assumed it'd be under Tray Icon!
Also I'd assumed that unticking a disk in HDD options would remove it from HDS monitoring altogether. (I didn't know what the status window was as I'd not seen it.)
Plus it's not obvious that double clicking a disk will change the tray icon visibility.

Anyway unticking the HDD option "Display only the highest temperature on tray" does indeed give me a single tray icon which is great, but when I use hover-help, it only displays details of the highest temp disk, when I was really looking for a summary of all the disks. However I've since discovered that info is available in the Status window!

However my preference would really be to have that Status window info displayed via hover-help over a single tray icon rather than permanently displayed (I find that one tends to tune-out permanent displays and anything that makes the screen less busy is good). I did think that as a workaround I could move the Status window to my secondary display, but I found that it snaps back to the primary.

Does that help explain what I was thinking about for the feature?

[hdsentinel]

> Naively I'd assumed it'd be under Tray Icon!

That menu offers options to customize the displayed tray icon(s) only Sorry for the confusion.

> Also I'd assumed that unticking a disk in HDD options would remove it from HDS monitoring altogether.
> (I didn't know what the status window was as I'd not seen it.)

No, it only hides from the Status Window. That is a special window displayed always on top, showing quick overview/status.
You can show/hide it by the "Show status window" button in Hard Disk Sentinel (the 3rd button from left, a hard disk inside a blue box/window).
Please check the Help about it.

> Plus it's not obvious that double clicking a disk will change the tray icon visibility.

Please read the information just above the list of hard disks:
"Double click to select system tray icons."

> Anyway unticking the HDD option "Display only the highest temperature on tray" does indeed give me a single tray icon which is great,
> but when I use hover-help, it only displays details of the highest temp disk,

Yes, of course.

> when I was really looking for a summary of all the disks.

The tray icon hint is limited to show only very small amount of information. This is a limitation of Windows, so there it is simply not possible to show ALL disks. So no, the tray icon hint always displays the details of the hard disk related to the tray icon itself.

> However I've since discovered that info is available in the Status window!

Yes, it can display more details

> did think that as a workaround I could move the Status window to my secondary display, but I found that it snaps back to the primary.

Only if you have the "Snap to screen edges" option enabled at Configuration -> Status window
If not, then you can move to secondary monitor with no problems.

To display information differently, you may also consider

- disable the "Always on top" option at Configuration -> Status window. So then the status window will not be above other windows.
And if you simply click on the temperature tray icon, it will be immediately displayed.

- "Display information on desktop" option at Configuration -> Status window. This would display the contents directly on the desktop at specific X / Y coordinates (by adding larger number than the current resolution, this can be on the 2nd monitor also).
This way it will be displayed "below" all other windows, so if you see the desktop - then this information is also displayed.

- You may use Windows Vista/7 Sidebar gadget option to show information there.

This gives plenty of options to select how the information displayed

[B00ze]

Good day.

Today I tried HD Sentinel for the first time. I'm looking for a good SMART monitoring solution that runs as a service, because I run "Standard" users in Windows and cannot therefore run simple SMART tools under those users. So I tried a few things (I got SmartMonTools installed, I will look at the MAN later). So I found Hard Disk Sentinel and was interested in the fact that it monitors and warns about SMART values BEFORE the threshold is hit. However, this "feature" of having one system tray icon for each hard drive is totally annoying to me. I do NOT need to watch every hard drive in my system tray - in fact since HDS can do alerts, all I really need the tray icon for, is to bring-up the GUI once in a while. So I headed to the forums and found this thread...

>> Anyway unticking the HDD option "Display only the highest temperature on tray" does indeed
>> give me a single tray icon which is great, but when I use hover-help, it only displays details
>> of the highest temp disk,

> Yes, of course.

This might be good to display temperature, but what I want is a single "health" icon that is green when all my drives are green, yellow when 1 drive goes yellow, red when 2 drives are yellow or when 1 drive is red, etc. I'm not really interested in temperature. The best I found (which just might be enough, I am considering buying your product, especially with the lifetime upgrade policy, but I would prefer 1 health icon) is to disable all icons, and checkmark the one called "display total activity under 1 icon" - this way I have an icon that reassures me HDS is running, and some way to bring-up the main window if I need to (believe or not, but if you disable all icons, HDS keeps running with no way for the user to bring back the main window again).

>> when I was really looking for a summary of all the disks.

> The tray icon hint is limited to show only very small amount of information.
> This is a limitation of Windows, so there it is simply not possible to show ALL
> disks. So no, the tray icon hint always displays the details of the hard disk
> related to the tray icon itself.

Deciding to show a single icon in the system tray is not a limitation of windows, it is a design decision. But I do agree that you can't display a summary for an infinite number of disks on hovering over the icon, at some point there is no more room (altho I bet Windows will happily let you create a hover bubble 10 kilometers high and not complain).

I'm off to read HDS's docs and have a look at SmartMonTools MAN page.
Please consider a single status icon for all disks, I can't believe there's no option for this...

Best Regards,

[hdsentinel]

> This might be good to display temperature, but what I want is a single "health" icon that is green when all my drives are
> green, yellow when 1 drive goes yellow, red when 2 drives are yellow or when 1 drive is red, etc.
> I'm not really interested in temperature.

Of course this is possible very quickly and easily with this trick:

1) open Configuration -> Hard Disk Drives page and select "Display only the highest temperature on tray" option, to get only one icon.
2) on Configuration -> Thresholds/Tray icon page, you can configure the behaviour of the tray icons (now only this one):
3) on the bottom, enable the "Display hard disk health sign on tray icon" options (by default, only the "Bad: below 25%" option displayed, so the red sign would be displayed automatically when a drive falls below 25% health.
Then you may notice that the icon will show the temperature (the highest temperature of all disks) and a health sign (the lowest health of all disks) alternating.
4) disable the "Display temperature on the tray icon"

And then you'll get only one tray icon, which constantly show the sign regarding of the LOWEST health value of your hard disks:
so if any of the hard disk drives fall below 50% health, you'll see a yellow exclamation mark (warning) and if drops below 25%, then a red X (alert).
Otherwise, the green check mark, confirming that all drives are above 50%.
Of course on that page, you can adjust all threshold levels, so you may even increase the thresholds, to get alert (both visually and in other ways if configured) earlier.


> to disable all icons, and checkmark the one called "display total activity under 1 icon" -
> this way I have an icon that reassures me HDS is running, and some way to bring-up the main window
> if I need to (believe or not, but if you disable all icons, HDS keeps running with no way for the user to bring back the main window again).

Originally, Hard Disk Sentinel ALWAYS places at least one icon on the tray, exactly to allow user to click on it, to open its main window.
And due to the requests (to completely hide all tray icons) it is no longer required, so yes, now you can hide all tray icons of Hard Disk Sentinel.
And this is done because there are still ways to open Hard Disk Sentinel main window:
- double click on its Desktop / Quick Launch icon
- open its shortcut from the Start Menu
- launch HDSentinel.exe manually from its program group
- use configured hot-key combination (see Configuration ->


> Deciding to show a single icon in the system tray is not a limitation of windows, it is a design decision.

Sorry, we spoke about tray icon HINT, the small bubble

> (altho I bet Windows will happily let you create a hover bubble 10 kilometers high and not complain).

Excuse me, but you'd surely lose if you bet on this.
Windows limits the amount of information displayed on the tray icon bubbles, as you can see at
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 85%29.aspx
szInfo: A null-terminated string that specifies the text to display in a balloon notification. It can have a maximum of 256 characters, including the terminating null character, but should be restricted to 200 characters in English to accommodate localization.

> Please consider a single status icon for all disks, I can't believe there's no option for this...

Of course there is solution for this

[B00ze]

First of all, thank you for the fast reply!

<procedure>

And then you'll get only one tray icon, which constantly show the sign regarding of the LOWEST health value of your hard disks.

Ah Ah! I had tried that, but then when you hover over the tray icon it displays the stats of 1 drive, so I did not figure the icon's color would be that of the lowest of all drives - it's hard to test on this laptop; I do have a system with a totally bad drive, but only 1 bad drive, so I still could not have tested this fully. Thanks. However, see my new thread - you can't have tray icons in Service mode :-(

And due to the requests (to completely hide all tray icons) it is no longer required, so yes, now you can hide all tray icons of Hard Disk Sentinel.
And this is done because there are still ways to open Hard Disk Sentinel main window:
- double click on its Desktop / Quick Launch icon
- open its shortcut from the Start Menu
- launch HDSentinel.exe manually from its program group
- use configured hot-key combination (see Configuration)

Lol, ya, I figured while sleeping that I could probably bring-up the window by re-running the exe; somehow it had escaped me when I was fooling around HDS, I just killed the process lol - duh!

Excuse me, but you'd surely lose if you bet on this.
Windows limits the amount of information displayed on the tray icon bubbles, as you can see at
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 85%29.aspx
szInfo: A null-terminated string that specifies the text to display in a balloon notification. It can have a maximum of 256 characters, including the terminating null character, but should be restricted to 200 characters in English to accommodate localization.

Lol, well thanks for researching this - I'm surprised, I've seen some big bubbles (but perhaps they were windows without border etc). It mattered not, you can't go ahead and open-up a bubble that's as high as the screen, it looks bad and you'd never know how much was hidden, but I'd figured Windows would let you do it if you wanted :-)

Best Regards,

[hdsentinel]

Yes, if you have only one hard disk, then it is not too spectacular, as it shows the status of the 1 drive

> Thanks. However, see my new thread - you can't have tray icons in Service mode

By default no, but this is exactly why the Hard Disk Sentinel Tray is designed: you can launch from the Hard Disk Sentinel program group (or manually start HDSentinelTray.exe from the folder of Hard Disk Sentinel.

This can be used by any user (even with limited user rights) and it is designed exactly to
- show disk status information on tray icon(s)
- allow checking LIMITED disk status information
exactly to prevent the user (with limited user rights) from performing other actions (eg. performing complete disk tests, adjusting hard disk functions/features, changing configuration etc.)

So if you use Hard Disk Sentinel in Service mode, then the Hard Disk Sentinel Tray is a good extension for that.
This is described in the Help of course.

> Lol, ya, I figured while sleeping that I could probably bring-up the window by re-running the exe;
> somehow it had escaped me when I was fooling around HDS, I just killed the process lol - duh!

Yes, you can always use brute force Just may be not the best solution.
Users asked to allow hiding all tray icons wrote "I do not need tray icon to access the software - as I can access with the shortcut on the Desktop / Quick Launch". And this is completely true.

[B00ze]

Good day.

By default no, but this is exactly why the Hard Disk Sentinel Tray is designed: you can launch from the Hard Disk Sentinel program group (or manually start HDSentinelTray.exe from the folder of Hard Disk Sentinel. This can be used by any user (even with limited user rights) and it is designed exactly to: show disk status information on tray icon(s), allow checking LIMITED disk status information - exactly to prevent the user (with limited user rights) from performing other actions (eg. performing complete disk tests, adjusting hard disk functions/features, changing configuration etc.) So if you use Hard Disk Sentinel in Service mode, then the Hard Disk Sentinel Tray is a good extension for that.

I was wondering what that HDSTray shortcut was for! Wow, you think of everything don't you ;-)

This is described in the Help of course.

I didn't read the help from top to bottom, just looked at some places; seems I missed the Tray help :-(

Best Regards,