Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi I recently added 2 new drives (a HDD and a NVMe drive) taking my total drives up to 15 disks, ever since I've done this Hard Disk Sentinel Pro 6.0.1.0 has become unresponsive. Whenever I click on any tabs preferences etc, it just hangs and eventually closes due to an app crash.

Here's what event viewer says.

Faulting application name: HDSentinel.exe, version: 6.0.1.0, time stamp: 0x2a425e19
Faulting module name: HDSentinel.exe, version: 6.0.1.0, time stamp: 0x2a425e19
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x001cee10
Faulting process id: 0x0xE5C
Faulting application start time: 0x0x1D929D4227E37E1
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Hard Disk Sentinel\HDSentinel.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Hard Disk Sentinel\HDSentinel.exe
Report Id: 87435d77-94f1-4b09-b71f-fb5038107c34
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Any idea what's happening here? It's a Ryzen 7 5800x running windows 11, 8 of the drives (7HDD + 1 SSD) are running on an LSI card the rest bar 1 which is connected via a USB hard drive dock are connected directly to the mobo using windows basic sata driver as per AMD's instructions.

Sorry for the possible troubles, but generally this means that there is an issue with the storage subsystem: one or more disk(s) / controller(s) may not respond for the disk access during the periodic detection as should.

Hard Disk Sentinel is simply waiting for the disk drives / storage devices to respond when it attempts to detect the status information.
Usually the status detection happens quickly (in most cases question of milliseconds for a drive) but somehow this may not happen now: if there is no response from the device, then yes, I'm afraid it happens what you see: the software is still waiting (and seems not responding, but it does not mean its frozen, failing or so).

Would be nice to investigate the situation, verify what can cause the issue, what is in the background.

If you see it starts up, I suggest to open Configuration -> Send test report page. There it is possible to create+save a developer (test) report and please send it to info (at) hdsentinel (dot) com address. Then it is possible to check it, verify which drive(s) or device(s) (eg. the LSI card or the USB dock) may respond slower/harder than expected.

Not sure, but is it possible that the default detection frequency adjusted?
I'd check the Configuration -> Advanced options -> Detection frequency setting: too frequent detections may cause similar as then the software can't respond to you as it is constantly communicating with the devices.

Thanks for the response, report sent.

I've checked the settings and they're still at the default 5 min interval, I've tried setting this to 2 hours and ticking the box for alerts if a drive isn't responding but nothing changes.

I've tried removing the 2 physical drives I added (they're hot swap) but the issue still remains. Perhaps it's the NVMe? it shares bandwidth with the 4x pci slot so I wonder if it's causing conflicts with the LSI card? saturated bus? not sure.

Interestingly both CrystalDiskInfo and StableBit Scanner work completely fine I'd imagine they're coded to run differently that your software but surely they'd still need to communicate with the storage subsystem?

Thanks for the report. Sorry for the delayed answer, wanted to examine and tried to reproduce with similar controller. I can confirm I did not encounter any such or similar issue.

Generally there should be no problems with the LSI controller and the NVMe SSD of course. Both are supported of course and should work without issues.

According the report, I see no real problems: all drives detected and reported - and the detection completed with no delays/freezes.
Maybe a minor issue: the drives connected to the onboard SATA ports managed by a Standard AHCI controller driver as displayed on the Information page. This is usually not a big problem but in some rare cases the missing (not installed) chipset driver may cause minor compatibility issue.

Would be nice to investigate what can be the in the background, when do you encounter the troubles. Not sure, but maybe
- after longer time of use (so after many periodic detections passed)
- after a longer time of uptime
- after longer time of inactivity
- after resuming from standby/hibernation (if applicable)
- after connecting/removing external drive
or anything similar.
This may give some ideas, thoughts.


> Interestingly both CrystalDiskInfo and StableBit Scanner work completely fine

Not really interesting. According the report, Hard Disk Sentinel also worked completely fine: detected and reported the drives.
Maybe after longer time or after some status updates a driver or device may not responding properly. Maybe it is simply not triggered if the other tools do not detect/update status for long enough.


> I'd imagine they're coded to run differently that your software but surely they'd still need to communicate with the storage subsystem?

Yes, they surely coded differently.
Generally Hard Disk Sentinel has special code for LSI specific controllers, designed exactly to communicate such controllers better. This allows (for example) to detect status in RAID configurations and/or unconfigured, hot spare, cache drives and so - which are not supported by any other tool.
Maybe that code could be the difference - but never encountered problems with it in 10+ years.

I'll send e-mail too with some thoughts.

Hi, thanks for the response.

I did another clean install of the beta version and the issue still persists, the app slows to a crawl almost as soon as the please register screen is closed, after a few minuets it results in the previously mentioned app crash. This is from a fresh reboot.

The portable version seems to run fine so I think there's something wrong with the real time reporting causing the freeze. I've tried disabling my anti virus (Bitdefender) that didn't work though I wasn't really expecting it to since I run it on another PC fine with HDS.

The only thing that's changed was the addition of the drives but I can't see how that would be causing an issue as they've just been added to controllers that were working fine previously. The drives all report perfect health as well. Removing them doesn't seem to fix anything either.

Not really sure what's going on.

Generally if the Portable version is different, then there is something in the folder of the installed version: maybe a setting (configuration/INI file), a somehow damaged status/statistics/log file or similar.

Please refer to the e-mail I sent with an idea about to make a clean reinstallation:
I'd suggest to uninstall Hard Disk Sentinel, completely delete the folder where installed
( C:\Program Files (x86)\Hard Disk Sentinel ) to delete the settings, statistics, etc. just to be sure
and try to reinstall.

If you do not delete the folder, then the re-installed version automatically uses all previous statistics, settings, logs etc. If some of these files/previous data related, they will cause troubles after reinstallation too (unless you remove them).

Hi,

I had read your email but had already taken steps to completely erase all trases of HDS from my system (using everything to delete any folder or file with the name) this did not work.

Since I was at a complete loss I decided to try a full os reinstall and since then the app seems to be working fine. when I'd origionally upgraded to Windows 11 mid December I did so with a upgrade install from windows 10 rather than a fresh so I can only assume a lingering setting somewhere was causing the fault though again I'm not sure as to why it took more than a month to cause an issue.

Anyway the app is working completely fine now is as response as ever and is reporting all drives with updates so this can be marked as fixed.

Thanks for your help and I'm really enjoying the small facelift the beta app has are you at all planning on offering a dark mode in the future?

Thanks for the info. Really weird... Anyway, good to hear things seem working now correctly as should.
Maybe if you prefer, you can use Report menu -> Send test report to developer option now as then I can check and compare with the previous situation. Not sure, but it may give some thoughts, ideas about what happened - and if there is anything to change, optimize in a future version.

Thanks for your kind words about facelift Yes, I can confirm that additional changes planned and hopefully the dark mode will be available too this year.