Hard Disk Monitoring

Still having problems with HDS identifying the drives in a RAID box with JMicron chipset. I sent another bug report for this new box I just got.

http://www.orico.cc/goods.php?id=4827

Hi,

Thanks for the report, from that yes, I see everything working correctly: all drives detected and displayed correctly as should.

You wrote: "Today it is recognizing the drives, but yesterday it wasn't. They all seem to use a JMicron chipset (JMS567) in this case."

Yes, in some cases the JMicron chipset may not respond for all detections.
This may be related to USB controller/driver or something else in the operation of the JMicron chip which may prevent accessing the status information.
I'm afraid this is known for such JMicron chipsets and may happen generally, then usually a power cycle can help as now.

Would be nice to check what can cause the troubles in your case: what happens if you try to connect (at least for a test) to USB 2.0 connection (so having a completely different USB controller).

Also would be nice if you can try to examine and "connect" the issue to some event: when the status information is no longer displayed.
It may be related to (for example)
- longer inactive period (there is no reads/writes for longer time and the device or drive(s) may enter standby mode, causing some troubles. Please note that this may happen regardless of Windows power management setting: such external drives, enclosures may have their own power management.
- exactly the opposite: higher, intensive usage which causes intensive stress for the JMicron chip
- higher operating temperature of the enclosure (may be related to the above)
- entering/leaving standby/hibernation state of the computer

In many cases, preventing disks entering standby mode helps: if the device can't enter to sleep/standby mode, it may work better and provide the status information as should.

So I'd recommend to open Configuration -> Disk Control page and in the "Do not allow spin down of disks" field, specify a * character.
This way Hard Disk Sentinel will periodically send a command to the drives to keep them awake.