High speed hard disks, small and crowded chassis can cause very high temperatures. This means that the hard disk is not able to cool down. Disk performance and reliability significantly decrease as temperature increases and above 50 °C failure can occur any time. Disk manufacturers often limit the maximum operating temperature to 50 degree centigrade. However, it is recommended to keep your hard disks at lower temperature (approximately 35-40 °C is good) to increase their life time.

It is possible to configure Hard Disk Sentinel to send e-mail and/or network message if a failure predicted, if a hard disk is too hot or if a critical SMART parameter is degraded. Also it can be used to send daily reports about the current status of hard disks. So (under the licensing conditions) it is possible to install Hard Disk Sentinel on more computers and the comuters report the problems to system administrator.

This requires the registered and activated version of Hard Disk Sentinel installed on the remote computer(s).

We are working on a client-server architecture to real-time monitoring hard disks in remote computers.

Yes, it is possible since v2.02b. Hard Disk Sentinel can run as a service - examining the hard disk status and make alerts even if there is no user logged to the computer or if the user does not have administrator rights. The administrator rights only required to configure and install the service.

By using this feature and the network architecture, it will be possible to remotely monitor and manage hard disk status in a shop, library, office or even larger company. The complete architecture will be released in 2007 summer.

It reflects the health status of the hard disk. Problems decrease this value differently. Until version 1.40, Hard Disk Sentinel used the same condition method in all cases. In versions after 1.40, it is possible to select from three methods so it is possible to select how "strict" the calculation should be (how a problem affect the overall health value).

When upgrading to a newer version after 1.40, the application uses a less drastically but still strict health calculation method by default. This means that the health value may change. The user then select the old (strict) method if he wants.

Please enable "Modify default hard disk icons" on the Configuration, Disk Control panel. If you use Windows XP, you may need to upgrade to SP2 to view the disk status on icons.

The problem is caused by User Account Control (UAC) feature of the Vista. Normally it does not allow the application to run as Administrator (even if you logged as Administrator).

Please do the following: locate the installation folder of Hard Disk Sentinel in Windows Explorer (by default, it is C:\Program Files\Hard Disk Sentinel). Right click on HDSentinel.exe and select Properties.

Please select "Compatibility" panel and enable "Run this program as administrator" in the Privilege level box.

Enable to run as Administrator

After this, the application should work. However, Windows Vista may still ask you to allow it to run. Please click on "Allow" to let Hard Disk Sentinel run.

Allow Hard Disk Sentinel to access the hard disk information

Please try to use the latest available version. If you encounter problem with it, please download an older version and verify if you experience the same problem.

The problem is related to the driver of the storage controller.

Hard disk details (for example hard disk serial number, physical information and features) and more information like health and temperature are not displayed because the driver of the hard disk controller does not support the necessary ATA commands.

Updating the driver of the disk controller (if there is an updated version available) can help in this situation.

This problem usually happens if

• you needed to supply driver package to install Windows during the installation
  (these drivers usually support only minimal features but not detecting details)
  
• you are using Vista
  (for many motherboards/hard disk controllers there are no real 100% working Vista drivers available)
  
  

Using AHCI controller: AHCI controller drivers may not provide hard disk information properly. If possible, please select "IDE" mode in the BIOS setup for the Serial ATA controller, especially if you are using operating systems prior to Windows Vista.

NVidia chipset and Vista: This case installing the drivers designed to XP can fix this issue. To do this, please try these steps:

The performance information is based on the Performance Counter objects of Windows (2000/XP/2003/Vista) systems. Hard Disk Sentinel reads these counters and displays performance information based on them. Hard Disk Sentinel has no control on these counters, how they work because they are controlled by Windows itself.

The operating system assigns performance counters to hard disks while booting. So if the disk is an external one and connected later (after Windows completed the booting sequence), the performance monitoring may not be possible.

To verify if the operating system detects the performance values, please start the performance monitoring tool from Microsoft:
Click Start -> Run and type "Perfmon".
On the bottom right side of the window (under the graphs) you can see a list of currently displayed performance counters. Please click on them and press "DEL" button to remove all.
Then above this space (on the empty graph) please right click and select "Add Counters"
Under "Performance Objects" please select "PhysicalDisk"
Under "Select counters from list" please select "% Disk Time" (or "Disk Bytes/Sec" - these two counters are displayed in Hard Disk Sentinel).
Under "Select instances from list" please select instances for your drives (eg. "0 C:") or select all.
Click on "Add" and then "Close".

Now you should see how the values are changing for the selected hard disks. Please copy or move some files to see how the graphs are changing, reflecting the actual disk usage or the transfer rate. You can compare the values displayed here and in Hard Disk Sentinel. These should be nearly the same (some differences is possible because of the different sampling times).

Here are more details about re-building performance counter objects of Windows. In case of a trouble (no performance information displayed), please check the following pages: