A Different days/hours time on problem

[bgoodman4]

I have recently purchased a new SSD laptop and am running the latest version of HDS. The PC is 2 months old but HDS is showing less than 1 day of usage (actually 3 hours). I also am running an external Thunderbolt USB drive which has been connected for about 1 month and HDS is showing that it has been running for just under 4 days. Why am i not getting more accurate time on estimates. I understand that the value is an estimate but I am concerned that for some reason HDS is not recording the data correctly. FYI I purchased the external drive because HDS indicated that my old external drive had only 3 months of life left so for the old drive HDS was clearly functioning as expected.

[hdsentinel]

Generally Hard Disk Sentinel reads the internal power on time counter of the hard disk / SSD, which internally counts the power on time of the device.
You can any time open the S.M.A.R.T. page and locate the "Power on time", "Power on hours" or similar attribute and check both its current value (plus the change over time on the bottom graph) as provided by the SSD or hard disk drive.

These are NOT estimates of course. There can be situations where some additional testing required and then the word "estimate" can be displayed (eg. for some special SCSI/SAS hard disk drives or SSDs) but this is different.

It is known that some SSDs, for example the one you have does NOT count/report the power on time correctly. Not really sure if this is by design (as then the SSD may seems "younger" than actual) or a firmware bug of the SSD. Personally I asked the manufacturer about the situation and expected a firmware update which may correct this behaviour - but received no response yet.
I'd recommend to ask the manufacturer of the SSD about the situation, as hopefully they can provide a firmware update.

For the external hard disk drive, the situation is slightly different: likely the internal very agressive power management function simply puts the drive to standby/sleep very often when there is no disk activity (no file read/written). As the hard disk counts and reports the power on time in hours, any non-complete hour may be never calculated and lost and this results the very small power on time value.

To get correct power on time reading, I'd recommend to try adjusting the hard disk sleep timeout in Windows Power Management settings first, just to check if there is any difference. Also you may check if there is a firmware update and/or tool for the external drive which may adjust this setting.

Hard Disk Sentinel works as expected with both devices: both by detecting and displaying the status - and also revealing such/similar weirdness in the operation of the disk drives.

[bgoodman4]

Thank you, much appreciated.