Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi all.

My hard drive makes a bit of a buzzing sound when accessed. Now that I've installed HD Sentinel, I notice that it makes the buzzing sound all the time. When HDS accesses the Temperature reading, is it accessing the entire drive? If it is constantly accessing the drive, this must be very bad for the long-term health of the drive.

Any ideas on how to work around this? Can I limit it to check once every 10 minutes? I checked the settings, and it's already set to do this.

Ok thanks
User587

Hi,

I can confirm Hard Disk Sentinel accesses the drive periodically - but only when it is configured to read and update the health and tempeature values.

By default, this occurs once per every 5 minutes and of course it can be adjusted by the Configuration -> Advanced options -> Detection Frequency setting. Just move the slider to right to enable less frequent detection.

Between these periodic detections, Hard Disk Sentinel does not access the hard disk (except if an other option is set, for example Configuration -> Disk control -> Do not allow spin down of hard disks, which is designed exactly to keep the hard disk active).

How often do you hear the buzzing sound? Constantly (for example in every seconds, minutes or so?)

Please use Report -> Send test report to developer option - this may help to check the status of the hard disk and advise.

I'm guessing this is related. Not that I get a buzzing sound, but my drive similarly makes a regular sound every 5 seconds or so, a kind of "dagug" noise (not overly harsh but definitely noticeable). This is on an external USB 3.0 drive, a WD Black 2TB. The activity indicator on the case flashes correspondingly with the sound. If I exit HDS, the sound and light go away (mostly). In my Advanced Options, Detection frequency is set to 5 min (default). I have "display only total activity on a single tray icon" selected, and have turned off all other drive tray icons. It happens whether the Status Window is showing or not.

Looking at Disk Performance, there's a corresponding burst of 14k Current Read data (lasts barely 1 sec.) though Current Disk Activity stays at zero. If I exit HDS, I noticed similar behavior occurs when a program is accessing the drive; I'm thinking maybe it's Windows caching kicking in -- but I do have prefetch/superfetch and disk indexing disabled.

My point is that without HDS, the 5-second drive access *might* happen irregularly, but with HDS resident, the 5-second drive access *always* happens.

Any clues? Thanks.

By default, Hard Disk Sentinel polls drive status only once per every 5 minutes.

The option Configuration -> Disk Control -> Do not allow spin down of disks is designed exactly to send periodically a command to the hard disk, to prevent it from spin down / parking. This occurs regularly, once per every 5 seconds.
Do you use that option, did you specify the hard disk number (or a * to apply this on all hard disks) in that field?

Hi, sorry for the delay. No, I don't have anything set in that field. However now I'm not sure what to think, as I have HDS running to look at that option and the drive is quiet (no access). Lately I've just been shutting it down when I start up the notebook (by habit). So I'm no longer sure that HDS is causing the noise. I'll continue to monitor.