Hard Disk Monitoring

Ok, I've come to realize and accept that HDS will not be usable for some external devices - especially those that never spin down or always spin up after being idle when HDS polls them...the polling occurring because they lie to HDS about their actual power state.

What I'm looking for now is a way to determine if my internal drives are working with HDS in the way that one would desire. That is, when they are not spinning, don't do anything that would cause them to spin up. So far on two different machines my internal drives Power State has always been shown as active. It could very well be the case that many of the processes I run 24/7 keep them active. Is there a way to activate logging such that I could look back and see if HDS detected a drive went idle/inactive?

A Report -> Send test report to developer option would be nice as then I could check the reported power state and the chip type in your external drives. These may help in further researching and improving the situation - for example to verify if it is possible to get the _real_ power state of the drive.

You can easily check that functionality with the internal hard disks:
- set the Configuration -> Advanced options -> Detection frequency to high value (eg. to poll information once per hour)
- set Windows hard disk idle timer to a smaller value (eg. spin down after 30 minutes).

On startup, HDS always detects information about all hard disks (so it will surely wake up the drives), but after 1 hour running (when the next detection should occur), the "Information" page will reflect "power state: slepping since ....." instead of "power state: active".
This would confirm if the disk controller provides the correct power state for HDS. If so, HDS does not wake up the drive until (on a next detection) it detects that the power state is active again.

If this does not happen, the above mentioned report would help to check the hard disk controller and its driver installed as these may also report improper power state information.

At the moment, no such log for detected power state is available but to diagnose such controllers/devices maybe it will be added (or a custom test tool will be made for the appropriate systems).

That would definitely be a great idea. Thanks.