Could HDSentinel help debug windows spindown issues?

[farmwald]

I have a number of windows 7 systems, with varying numbers of drives and controllers. Some of them spindown (windows "Turn off hard disk after...") nicely, and others never seem to spin down any disks.

It would be great if HDSentinel would provide some help with understanding the problems with any given system (i.e. it the problem drivers, controllers, drives, etc?)

Also, but related, APM (Advanced Power Management) is greyed out on most of my systems and most of my drives. Is this normal?

Finally, a command to force a drive to sleep *now* would be very helpful, especially if there was debugging output as to what happened.

[hdsentinel]

It is important to know that detection of health, temperature statistics works exactly as any other read/write command: clears the hard disk idle timer.
Hard Disk Sentinel periodically asks the status of the drives: it does once per every 5 minutes by default, this detection frequency can be adjusted at Configuration -> Advanced options page. So if you set "Turn off hard disk after..." in Windows but Hard Disk Sentinel checks status more frequently, the drive(s) may never spin down. However Hard Disk Sentinel checks if the drive is in sleeping status and if so, it does not wake up the drive just to detect its status.
So if you prefer to allow the drives to spin down, you may need to adjust detection frequency at Configuration -> Advanced options page.


In almost all cases the hard disk controller (and/or its driver) causes troubles. Some drivers may simply does nothing when any software (including Windows) sends the "standby" command to the drive, the command is blocked. The driver returns "OK" (command completed) but the actual command never reaches the drive, so the drive keeps spinning.
Another issue is that the driver may provide incorrect power status about the drive.

So if you encounter any issues, I'd recommend trying a different version of the driver as it may help. Please note that even older drivers may work better, for example Intel RST drivers after 10.5 are not really recommended.


> Also, but related, APM (Advanced Power Management) is greyed out on most of my systems and most of my drives. Is this normal?

It is greyed (not available) if the function is not supported by the hard disk. In this case yes, it is normal: if the function is not supported, it can't be adjusted.
Please check Information page -> ATA Features: there you'll notice "Advanced Power Management: not supported"

> Finally, a command to force a drive to sleep *now* would be very helpful, especially if there was debugging output as to what happened.

Thanks, yes, this may be a really interesting feature.
Not really sure if this works (see above) but yes, for debugging it may help as then you may not need to wait the idle timer.
So it may be available in a later version.

[farmwald]

Thanks for the help.

I will post a detailed update later, but I managed to get some SAS (LSI and Supermicro) controllers to allow disk spindown by editing the driver .inf files and/or using regedit. The details might be useful to others (especially those who use unRaid, Disk Bender, etc. with more than a couple of drives.)

The 5 min polling keeping the drives active is interesting. I manually changed the interval to be greater than the windows drive sleep timeout. Is there no way to improve HDSentinel, maybe by automatically changing the polling interval to be greater than the windows drive sleep timeout? Even better would be for status checking to not clear the hard disk idle timer - but I assume that's not possible.

Thanks.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks, personally I'll hardly wait the information, I'm sure it would be helpful for users !

Yes, it is planned to make the detection logic more intelligent: to automatically adjust the detection frequency based on the Windows drive sleep timeout.

I'm afraid, yes, I can confirm the other feature is not possible: checking the status of the drives act like a simple read command which automatically resets the idle timer, this can't be modified.

[firionicable]

I might say that you don't need to have this feature automatically as users can check it manually at any given time.