Hard Disk Monitoring

For a WD Passport USB drive the tranfer rate, in and out, goes up to about 80% and sits there, even when there is no disk activity. Everything else looks OK, and the transfer rate graphs are fine for other drives, but on this one it just pegs out and ignores what's actually going on.

At least it did. When I just checked after writing the above I found there was no transfer data at all. That is, even the internal drives aren't showing any activity at any time. I tried stopping and restarting HDSentienl.

Also, and I mention it here so I don't create a new post (perhaps I should), I just noticed that plugging in a USB external drive (stick or disk or dock) causes HDSentinel to do something that soaks up 60-90% of a CPU core for perhaps 20 seconds. Unplugging similarly causes significant CPU hogging for a similar time. What could be going on?

After the restart mentioned above, this CPU hogging is down to about 30% and from maybe 10 secs, so a restart has helped but not resolved it.

Please check http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#perf
for more information about the issues with the performance monitoring.
In general, the WIndows performance monitoring objects may be damaged. This is very common for some OSes when you plug in an USB hard disk which was not connected on startup.
Not really related to Hard Disk Sentinel - this is why re-starting Hard Disk Sentinel has absolutely no effect on this.

The temporary (short period) higher CPU usage is completely normal on connecting/removing the hard disk, however, it usually takes only 1-2 seconds, depending on the actual configuration.
When the change of configuration detected (adding / removing the hard disk) Hard Disk Sentinel detects the changed configuration and this may cause a slight
increase of CPU usage for a very short time. If one or more device(s) respond slowly, it may take some more seconds to detect the changed configuration. This may be true if you have high(er) number of hard disks and/or device(s) responding slowly.

If you can use Report -> Send test report to developer option, it is possible to check the actual configuration and verify which device(s) may respond slowly and check if things could be improved for them.
The best would be if you can use Report -> Send test report to developer option just after startup, the initial detection.

Thanks for the info. I'll try and remember to run off a report when I boot up tomorrow.

Two reports winging their way to you. After a USB stick insertion there was some CPU activity but not as heavy or for as long as yesterday.

Thanks for the reports !

Yes, I see that a RAID array used. Sometimes accessing the complete hard disk status may take some seconds and this (with a complete re-detect of the changed configuration) may cause some seconds delay with higher CPU usage when an external drive / pendrive instered or removed.

OK. Thanks for taking a look