Hard Disk Monitoring

Hello, long story short: when disks are asleep, sentinel wakes them during regular status check
at the same time, polling disks with smartctl.exe -i -n sleep /dev/sdX detect their sleep state without waking them.
so it would be super great to somehow make your program to query disks as delicate as smartctl does

a bit longer:

i have a z77 chipset system - standard controller, integrated asmedia controller and some sil 3132 cards
dual boot, win 7 & more or less fresh clean win 10 install
sil 3132 driver work perfectly in both systems guarding attached hdd's from waking, no worries here

driver versions
win 7
ASMEDIA : Standard AHCI 1.0 driver
7 Series / C216 integrated, AHCI mode: 9.3.0.1011
Sil 3132: 1.0.15.6

sentinel here works just fine, sleeping state at all controllers is detected correctly

win 10
ASMEDIA : Standard AHCI 10.0.14393.953 driver
7 Series / C216 integrated, AHCI mode: Standard AHCI 10.0.14393.953 driver
Sil 3132: 1.0.15.3

as i said earlier, sleep at 3132 attached drives is being detected fine
and with ASM/Intel, Sentinel wakes them every poll. i tried to play with driver versions, like 9.3.0.1020 and such, no luck here

Thanks!

If I remember right, sil3132 didn't works well with windows 10 and windows 2012. I had tons of problem with it when I had thise OS installed.
Details> https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Fo ... rohardware

kamcm wrote:If I remember right, sil3132 didn't works well with windows 10 and windows 2012. I had tons of problem with it when I had thise OS installed.
Details> https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Fo ... rohardware

3132 works just fine on both win 7 & 10 on my config

Thanks for your message and attention.

Yes, this is completely normal and not a bug - at least not in Hard Disk Sentinel. Also not really related to Windows 10 itself, but related only to the disk controller, its driver (which may be different under different OSes).

Generally Hard Disk Sentinel uses different techniques to detect FOR SURE the actual power state of the hard disks, exactly to prevent wake up only to detect and update status information.
This is done automatically and (based on the disk controller / driver) different methods used for this purpose - which is best for the actual configuration.

As you may noticed on the Information page, the "Power state" field shows the actual result: shows if the drive is active - or sleeping since .... (and not touched).

The problem is that some disk controllers provide incorrect power state: instead of the actual real status, some may always report
- always active (even if the hard disk is sleeping)
- always sleeping (even if the hard disk is active).
The later is true for most Intel SATA chipset controllers. If this happens, Hard Disk Sentinel need to determine if this information may be accurate - and as it is not really true, yes, it attempts the periodic detection.
(some controllers are even worse: wake up drives JUST to provide the power state information)

The other tool may check the status - and also receives the incorrect response. It may leave the drive in sleeping state (and also not performing detection when the drive is really active).


> i have a z77 chipset system - standard controller, integrated asmedia controller and some sil 3132 cards

As I know, the other tool does not support SiI controllers, can't detect status (especially in RAID configuration) but this is an other story...


> Sentinel here works just fine, sleeping state at all controllers is detected correctly

Yes I know


> and with ASM/Intel, Sentinel wakes them every poll. i tried to play with driver versions, like 9.3.0.1020 and such, no luck here

In theory, if the ASM controller has same driver as under Win7, then it should work similarly.
The Intel controller works similarly.

What happens if you try the Standard AHCI driver for any (or both) of the controllers?


I'd suggest to please use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option.
Ideally you may send from both Windows 7 and Windows 10, as then it is possible to compare the results, at least for the ASMEDIA controller where things seem work differently.
These developer reports always give ideas, thoughts about possible changes, improvements for the specific controllers/drivers.

Generally I can recommend the following:

1) on Configuration -> Advanced options page, you can adjust the detection frequency. By dragging the slider to right, you can configure Hard Disk Sentinelt o detect less frequently (to less frequently wake up drives)

2) on this Configuration -> Advanced options page, below the slider, there is an option Automatic detection based on disk utilization designed exactly for this situation.
If you enable this option, when Hard Disk Sentinel should perform the automatic detection, it verifies if there was any real disk activity (reads/writes) since the last detection - and only performs the detection if there was any traffic. Otherwise (regardless of the driver and its functions, incorrect response) the hard disk is not touched.
The source of this is the real-time performance information (which you can examine on the Disk Performance page) - if it's working and Windows provide this information and performance counters correctly.