Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi,

I've just installed a new machine with Windows 7 64 bit and HDSentinel won't display "disk performance" either on the SDD or the HDD mounted. The pointer to the FAQ (http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#perf) turnes out to be accurate, however: When checking the registry, I found "Disable Performance Counters" set to "1".

My question now is towards the "why": I certainly didn't disable the counters. The machine was installed only days ago. Are the counters purposefully disabled by default on x64 installs? Are there any drawbacks to enabling them? Apparently the performance hit should be neglegible on modern systems, but is this also true on x64 systems?

Or is it just assumed by MS that no user in his right mind would use this feature anyway, so lets keep it disabled by default?

Glad if someone could shed some light here.

Regards

Hi,

I can confirm that the real-time performance monitoring has no negative impact (even negligible) on system performance.
This is true for all modern systems (running Win7x64) and older ones (simple P3-P4 ones).

Anyway, some system tweaking tools may disable this feature of the OS to "improve" performance and reduce usability and compatibility. Not sure if you use such tools but if so, it may cause that the performance monitoring is disabled as it is always enabled by default.

Apart from the above, the most common cause of disabled performance monitoring is caused by Windows itself.
When one or more devices do not provide performance information as should (for example if its just inserted and software like Hard Disk Sentinel wants to get the real time performance information), then Windows may completely disable performance monitoring.

The page http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#perf discusses this problem and also shows a special method (see "Update...") section which may help in this situation. This prevents Hard Disk Sentinel to access performance counters on newly inserted devices and this way Windows may keep the performance counters working (if you previously enable them as described at http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#perf ).

There are different topics in this forum also about this issue, for example:

viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1628

I learned a lot from the other thread same with this one. Thanks.