Hard Disk Monitoring

What temperature thresholds should I set for HD Sentinel alerts?

The drive manufacturer only specifices an operating range. Rule of thumb 80% YELLOW warning, 95% RED danger? The S.M.A.R.T. value for highest temperature ever recorded also could be a clue (the drives were operating long time before I ever had HD Sentinel and some are used drives with unknown history). Maybe these are the YELLOW warning values I should use?

Thank you.

In most situations, the default temperature thresholds are fine as these are automatically set based on the current configuration. For most drives (with 50 Celsius rated maximum temperature) these are set to 43 Celsius (yellow level) and 50 Celsius (red level). The thresholds are higher for notebook computers as those drives usually tolerate higher temperatures (their maximum operating temperature is usually higher).

However, you can any time change them in Configuration -> Thresholds/Tray icon page.

Note that it is good idea to verify the accuracy of the temperature sensor (see Help -> Appendix -> Temperature calibration) to verify if the temperature values provided by the hard disk is correct. Some drives may provide lower temperature than the actual, this is easily noticeable if the first value displayed after power ON is less than the actual room/office temperature.

Personally I recommend to keep the drive in the 35-40 Celsius range during idle periods. This allows enough space for increasing temperature during high workload (hard disk testing, defragmentation, antivirus scan, etc..) as it may increase the temperature with 8-10 Celsius or even more (depending on the actual situation).

As you may notice on the Temperature page, the highest temperature ever reached may be detected and displayed - even if HDSentinel was not active at that time, because the S.M.A.R.T. recorded that on most newer drives.

If you can use Report -> Send test report to developer option, I can check the actual hard disk and the temperature values and may advise on the current situation.

Thank you.