Hard Disk Monitoring

Something bizarre is happening here. I was using TeraCopy to transfer 2.5 TB of video files from internal SATA to a eSATA drive. I noticed the external drive becoming quite hot. I didn't have HDSentinel running at the time so I started it up to check the temp reading. Prior to that the transfer rates seemed rather slow... 75 MB/s. As soon as HDSentinel was running the transfer rate nearly doubled! It's now anywhere between 140-155 MB/s. Could this just be a mere coincidence?

Thanks for the info and the experiences!

I'd be more than happy to say Hard Disk Sentinel itself increased the transfer rate
But no, I suspect it is a coincidence only.

Maybe there was some caching issue with the drive, the controller (where any of the drives connected) and/or their driver.
If I'm correct, launching Hard Disk Sentinel (and the status/health/performance detection) may caused that the driver could flush its internal cache and after perforing the status information, it could synchronize the data flow again, which increased the performance.

In Hard Disk Sentinel, by the "Performance" page, you can monitor the current transfer rate of both drives, so if you see drop (again), you can immediately check which drive is slower than expected (where the Disk Activity % is 100%, confirmining that it has no idle time - while the other drive may have idle time, so waiting for the other). This function designed exactly to reveal possible bottlenecks, related to one of the drives (or their connection / controller).

External drives (usually in a smaller, closed case) usually become very hot - especially if it's a 3.5" drive and especially if the enclosure has no active cooling. That may also cause unstable operation or even degradation, so I'd recommend to pay attention to its temperature - especially during intensive file operations (like moving TBs of data between the drives).

Thanks for the reply. I thought it would probably be something like that. And the external was in a drop in dock, no case. It wasn't really that hot it turned out, only 110 F. It just felt like it was.