Hard Disk Monitoring

I upgraded from 4.10 today and I was trying to get a USB 3.0 drive to be recognized by my system, when it finally showed up I started a read test on the USB 3.0 drive and my C: Drive SSD, hit a heath 0%. I didn't believe it because of the USB 3.0 issue I was having but I stopped the read test, I rebooted and sure enough my SSD is again now at 100% health. Though on my graph of health it shows 0% that happened this morning.

I am now copying data from one internal drive to another. And now the destination drive is at 0% health and it can't even see the temperature. The copying of the drive data is still proceeding fine so I am thinking something is wrong with v4.20 of HDS and reading the smart data on my system. This is the first time I ever had an issue with HDS since I started using it.

The destination drive is giving me the following: I think will uninstall and go back to 4.10 after the drive copy finishes.

Did some more testing with 4.20 and nothing helped. I uninstalled it and installed it normally just in case something got screwed up with the update from within the HDS program. But that didn't help. It seems that any large amount of disk activity will make v4.20 say those drives are failing.

I updated my software RAID (FlexRAID) and the 2 drives with updated data that it was reading to calculate parity data for went red in HDS v4.20. I uninstalled v4.20 now and installed v4.10 and ran a validate on some files, and no drives went red or 0% health and no temp readings. So there really is something not working right for me with v4.20.

Thanks for your message.

However, I do not think the issue is related to Hard Disk Sentinel.
I'm almost sure the issue is related to the current version of hard disk controller driver (possily Intel RAID driver with a wrong version?)
That may periodically provide incorrect status information to software. Hard Disk Sentinel 4.20 has new methods to access proper disk status and "filter" out invalid information provided by the disk controller, but sometimes the buggy driver can still cause confusion.

The Support -> Driver Zone section at www.hdsentinel.com is designed exactly for this purpose, it contains the best driver versions for various systems/controllers.

Please use Report -> Send test report to developer option in Hard Disk Sentinel (the best would be to use in 4.10 and 4.20)
This would confirm the situation and also help to see what changed during the detection of disk status information on your system
and also this way it is possible to check the current driver and it is possible to select the best which should work really correctly - not only with Hard Disk Sentinel, but in general to prevent any kind of problems.

I did not yet receive the report from you - but I try to provide additional information as it may be helpful.

I suspect you may have Intel RST driver version 10.8, 11.0, 11.2 or 11.5.

Any of these Intel drivers contain several bugs, one of them is that periodically it provides incorrect values for the software which causes confusion (as you could see). Hard Disk Sentinel has protection against such issue - but unfortunately the driver sometimes can still provide incorrect status.

This is exactly why in Support -> Driver Zone at www.hdsentinel.com
there are different versions of the drivers are listed as working (10.5 and 11.6) because drivers between them (10.8, 11.0, 11.2, 11.5) have some bugs.


Personally I'd recommend to install version 11.6 of the driver from the above mentioned page
or directly from http://www.hdsentinel.com/driver/stor_w ... 030_pv.zip

After this upgrade (and restart) hopefully there will be no further 0% health and/or different such issues reported and the current, stable status should remain displayed. If you prefer, please use Report -> Send test report to developer option (before and after the update), so I can check if the update successful and the new status is stable and displayed.


Anyway, if you ever see 0% reported again (which may happen with the current driver but hopefully never with the newer), please try to
- send a screenshot immediately about the S.M.A.R.T. page to info@hdsentinel.com
- use Report -> Send test report to developer option as soon as possible
This way it is possible to check the reported (incorrect) status and then Hard Disk Sentinel could filter that status - to prevent it from displaying.

Thanks for the replies. Yes the issue was driver related and it is now fixed. Intel RST as you mention in your post. I upgraded from v11.0.0.1032 to the latest (v11.6.0.1030) that I found on Intel's site. I have just finished running some tests after updating the drivers and HDS to v4.20 and the error no longer occurs. I didn't send the report since I wanted to first be sure about the driver version. You might want to mention in the version history or readme file, that older versions of the RST drivers might have issues with v4.20 . Most people are generally in the "if it's not broke don't fix it" category when it comes to drivers. Unless some software tells me it requires updated drivers I tend to leave them alone.

Thanks for the confirmation and your experiences !

To be honest, there were really much problems with older drivers and most users already upgraded to version 11.6 of the RST drivers. That prevented the access of disk status information on some systems (and RAID configuration), so version 4.20 required to have other methods to get the status and due to the excessive amount of information/reports/requests, the primary focus was to release 4.20 for the newer drivers.

It was tested on lots of systems with older drivers also - but it seems on some systems older Intel drivers still can cause troubles ....
So I agree, the revision history will mention that it is recommended to upgrade Intel drivers for this version

Thanks for your help and anyway, the Report -> Send test report to developer option can be helpful (even after the update), as then it is possible to check a particular system where the older driver was wrong - and then it is possible to still improve Hard Disk Sentinel, as I'm sure there may be systems for years with the older drivers, exactly as you wrote

I also have been having minor glitches with v4.20 since it was released earlier the month. No such issues with v4.10!
My drive 0 (Corsair GT SSD) display is showing the last 7 consecutive days of 0% health but in the bar graph at the top shows 100% health. Whilst penning this report the display turned from green to red and health turned to 0% but reverted almost as quickly.
My drive 1 (Samsung HD300LJ) display has 2 non consecutive days of 0% health in the last week. All other days are 100% as is the health bar graph.
Drives 2, 3 and 4 are showing consistent health history at 95%, 99% and 97% respectively.

I don't believe my disks are bad; I think it must be the sensors playing up and interacting with Hard Disk Sentinel somehow. I have sent you a text report.

Thanks for the information and your experiences !

Excuse me for the troubles.
I checked the report you sent and I see that you also have the problem exactly as described in this topic:
the problem is related to the Intel RST driver you have, which provides incorrect information to Hard Disk Sentinel and cause constant confusion.
You have version 11.0 of Intel RST driver for Intel(R) 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller

As described some posts earlier, this driver is one of the "not recommended" ones as it does not work as should. Even if Hard Disk Sentinel checks the accuracy of the reported status information provided by the driver, it may periodically provide an incorrect status.

I'd recommend to open Support -> Driver Zone at www.hdsentinel.com
and upgrade to Intel RST driver 11.6 available from that page.
Then the problems should be gone - and the status should remain stable.

Excuse me for the troubles - in the name of Intel for their drivers ...