Hard Disk Monitoring

This is just an observation I've made recently, so please don't take it as a gripe or complaint.

It seems that HDSentinel only picks up data written to your drives from WMI data, and not physical drive information. This is already known, however I started a drive replacement on a RAID array and noticed HDSentinel( HDS) not showing any activity between the two drives. I know data from one is being read and written to the other to mirror it, but HDS does not pick this up. Is this because the RAID controller does not report this to windows? or does HDS not pick this up from windows? It might be nice to be able to see the data being counted towards the lifetime usage

Thanks for your message and attention.

The hard disk activity (which is displayed on the "Performance" tab) is collected by Windows itself by its "performance counters".
Hard Disk Sentinel reads and displays these "performance objects" (which is not really WMI - but yes, more related to Windows than the actual hard disks).

Windows performs this kind of data collection on its own level - for the drives it can access. However, as Windows can access the complete array (set of physical hard disk drives managed by the RAID controller together), it is possible that it can't measure the actual performance (and amount of read/written data) for each hard disks - depending on the actual RAID configuration and controller.
This is why you may see the actual transfer rate (amount of read/written data) for the drives together in the RAID set, but not for each drives in the array (you do not see that one drive is reading and the other is writing during the mirroring stage).
This would be possible only if yoU'd use Windows software RAID (available in Windows Server OSes by default) - as then Windows can independently manage both hard disks (so there would be different performance objects to monitor the actual transfer rate of both drives) - just grouping them into an array to form a single logical drive / partition.

In contrast, some hard disks (and more SSDs) have internal counters for total amount of data read/written. Hard Disk Sentinel detects them also and shows not only the current value(s) but how these change with time on the S.M.A.R.T. pages. I agree that (as it is independent from Windows and its limitations) can be a more reliable indicator of total amount of transferred data.

If you can use Report -> Send test report to developer option, it is possible to check the actual RAID controller, the current configuration of the drives and can advise more precisely about the current situation.

evanrich wrote:This is just an observation I've made recently, so please don't take it as a gripe or complaint.

It seems that HDSentinel only picks up data written to your drives from WMI data, and not physical drive information. This is already known, however I started a drive replacement on a RAID array and noticed HDSentinel( HDS) not showing any activity between the two drives. I know data from one is being read and written to the other to mirror it, but HDS does not pick this up. Is this because the RAID controller does not report this to windows? or does HDS not pick this up from windows? It might be nice to be able to see the data being counted towards the lifetime usage

Ahh thanks for the response. Yeah you have provided the WMI data bit to me in a previous question, but I was wondering why windows wasn't capturing the Data to/from the drives during a rebuild. This makes sense. I have no problem sending you the logs if you wish if it might in some way help improve the product, the server is just a home lab server, so nothing sensitive or anything

Thanks!

Me thanks too, glad if I could help

If you prefer, yes, you may use Report -> Send test report to developer option - as all such reports help further development.
Of course I can make sure that no personal / sensitive information will be sent, just the technical details which can help researching further possibilities about how to improve the software.