Hard Disk Monitoring

Does anyone know how HDS is supposed to report the status of drives in an external RAID box? I installed 4 old 2 TB WD Green drives in a Mediasonic USB 3.0 RAID enclosure. I set the box for RAID0 since I don't really care about losing data. I'm using the box for temporary storage. Initially HDS showed all 4 drive's SMART status. After a reboot or something, HDS only showed a single RAID0 hard drive SMART status data.

I had this problem with internal RAID cards before too. There was no consistency on how HDS displays hard drive status. I'd like to see each individual drive in a RAID0, since there isn't any rebuild capability, but in RAID 1, 5 or 10, a single status would be acceptable. Also, what is the single RAID0 SMART status data displayed? The best drive, the worst drive or just random data?

Probably still a bug in HDS, but thought I'd ask first.

Yes, there are numerous RAID boxes supported by (only) Hard Disk Sentinel: Hard Disk Sentinel detects and displays the status of the disk drives in the RAID enclosures just like if they'd be single (standalone) disks. So the status, temperature, health, S.M.A.R.T. information could be detected and displayed by Hard Disk Sentinel with such RAID boxes with 2, 4, 5 disk drives.

You can find list of devices at https://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibilit ... _disks.php
which lists RAID boxes too.

> After a reboot or something, HDS only showed a single RAID0 hard drive SMART status data.

To detect status information, the cooperation of the RAID box is required: its chipset should have special function(s) to access the status information.
Many of such boxes can be working, but it is possible that in some cases, the chipset may not provide information or provide incorrectly (or incomplete way) which may result that the disks and their status is missing.

Please use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option (not saving TXT / HTML report) as this way it is possible to check the "raw" response of the chipset, examine what happens during detection and what can be done.
Sometimes a driver/firmware update may be required in order to make things working.
This is true (for example) for Mediasonic ProRaid 2 Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Enclosure (HUR3-SU3S3), where firmware update is required (available from the bottom of www.mediasonic.ca/product.php?id=1398380591 ) in order to make things working.


> I had this problem with internal RAID cards before too.

The situation is 100% similar: the driver/firmware should able to provide the status information.
As you can see on https://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibilit ... ollers.php , many RAID controllers (IDE/SATA/SCSI/SAS) supported: all disks should be detected and displayed.
If things do not work, then
- the driver/firmware may not allow it (which can be updated)
- something may prevent accessing disk status. Many things can cause it, for example Windows Defender and/or a setting in Hard Disk Sentinel (Configuration -> Disk Control -> Disable detection of USB and SCSI disks is a common cause) or something else in the actual configuration.

In such cases, the software usually suggests to use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option - as then I can check the actual situation, advise about how to improve things.


> There was no consistency on how HDS displays hard drive status.

Hard Disk Sentinel always attempt to detect and display the status in consistent way.
Just when it is blocked I'm afraid it can't provide the information.


> I'd like to see each individual drive in a RAID0,

This is the general purpose of Hard Disk Sentinel, to detect and display status in ALL possible situations. This includes RAID configuration of course.


> Probably still a bug in HDS, but thought I'd ask first.

Of course absolutely NOT: if the status is missing or partial, then the limitation is usually related to the device itself.
From the mentioned developer report, I can check and help.

Thanks for your reply. The Raid Enclosure does report status of individual drives, but for some reason HDS doesn't always see it.

I did submit a bug report yesterday. Hopefully you'll be able to see what's happening from that.

Thanks for the report.

Now I see both 4 x 2 TB WD disk drives displayed, complete status of all disk drives (health, temperature, etc.) displayed in the RAID 0 configuration as should. This is the "normal" and expected behaviour.

If the status is sometimes missing, then the RAID controller chip in the enclosure may not respond properly, may not give the details as expected.
In some rare cases, this can happen
- after long time use of the enclosure
- after/during intensive use of the drives, performing high amount of data transfer (so generally related to an overheat condition of the RAID controller chip)
- due to power management functionality when the chip in the RAID box got confused and no longer provides status.

If I'm correct, usually a complete power cycle then helps and then status is displayed again (when the chip got a "reset").

If possible, please check:
- if there may be a firmware update avalable for the RAID enclosure, it may improve compatibility and operation in general
- if it's possible to improve cooling to reduce temperature, it may help. The drive temperatures are not too high - but it is possible that the internal of the enclosure is more hot
- if possible, try to disable power management to have a more stable communication way between the software and the RAID enclosure

May I ask the complete manufacturer and model of this RAID enclosure? Then I can try to investigate it with more details, perform tests.

Also, just to be sure, when you see the missing/incomplete status too, please use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option again.
This way I can compare with the current "good" status, examine the differences, possible error(s) reported by the RAID controller chip which can give some ideas.

Okay, I'll give your suggestions a try. I had a malfunctioning 2.5" SATA controller on a portable drive and that kept throwing the drives offline. After removing the bad drive I was only seeing the RAID0 drive, but now it's working again. That may have been the problem for this box.

It's a Mediasonic Pro Raid HFR7-SR3S2
http://www.mediasonic.ca/product.php?id=1429831006

No firmware updates on the website, but may be generic ones for the chipset. I'll have to investigate.