The Performance Bar

How, what, where and why - when using the software.
Pavan
Posts: 1
Joined: 2010.04.08. 11:03

The Performance Bar

Post by Pavan »

If i understand it right, "Health" is the important value in the "Overview" window
i wanna know what the "Performance" bar meassures in HD-sentinel,
what it stands for? and if "Performance %" works as a trigger connected to the "health" bar value? in the long
run if it continues to drop down
I have a Maxtor drive that have accidentaly lost a 1 of its 3 "Earth"pins (farthest out to left)
but the disk still continues to work!! and with 100 % health, its just that i see a pattern
that the highest most stabelized value in "performance"
have decreased to 96-100(sometimes it reaches 100% again)

earlier this week it hade first 98-100 %
then 97-100 %
and now 96-100 %
i guess it would be no surprice if 95-100 % appear soon
or perhaps it finally stabilizes now

HD Sentinel predict this disk have 686 days yet to live, it currently celebrates its 1138 days power on time birthday
the only thing it reports are "Problems occured between the communications of the disk and the host"

should i be concerned about the performance bar now?
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hdsentinel
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Re: The Performance Bar

Post by hdsentinel »

The Performance bar indicates how fast the drive is, compared to its full possible speed.
For example, if a parallel ATA drive can work in UDMA 133 but the controller can work only at UDMA 100, the Performance bar would not display 100% because the controller may limit the speed of the drive. Moreover, if an older 40 conductor cable would be used (which limits the transfer to 33 MBytes/sec) the Performance would be even lower (and we can even mention PIO mode which reduces the Performance bar more).

Not only the current transfer rate, but other factors also affect the Performance value, for example data transfer errors.
Also the drive has S.M.A.R.T. attributes which provides information about speed / performance, for example the "8: Seek time performance" attribute indicates the speed of the seek operations.
(such performance related attributes show the word "Performance" below the S.M.A.R.T. table in the "Flags" section when selected )

Usually the Health and Performance bars are independent. Even a drive with bad health (lots of problems) may operate at high speed, especially when the problems are not directly related to the surface (for example, upon spin up issues). Also lower performance may indicate problem with the controller, cable but not with the drive, resulting a high Health.
However, there are some situations (for example wrong power supply) which can negatively affect both Health and Performance because it may generate surface errors and data transfer problems.

For more information about the calculation, please press F1 in the software and select Appendix -> Performance calculation in the help. This describes which items are used to calculate this value and shows some examples.

If you experience some % differences on the performance, it is normal. Usually the seek time of the drive can cause such fluctuation. It is important to know that the current acoustic setting determine the speed of the seek operations: so if you select a faster (but louder) setting, the Performance bar may increase. Or if you use a slower (but more silent) setting, the Performance % may decrease a bit.
Please look File -> Acoustic Management Configuration about it.

The remaining drive lifetime is predicted based on the health value and the total time the drive were running. These are fine numbers and it is nice that the drive has no other problems, "just" the data transfer related issues. However as mentioned above, this does not really a drive problem (that's why the Health is still high) but may affect the performance because upon many transfer errors, the system may decrease the transfer speed to ensure stability. You can find more information about these also in the Help -> Appendix.
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