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About SMART and HDD sleep mode


user_4891

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Greetings everyone. I have a question before deciding on getting AIDA64 Extreme. As it says it reads SMART information from hard drives. First and foremost does it allow disk drives to stay in sleep mode if they’ve reached that status, not spinning them up unnecessarily just to read SMART? Secondly does it have an independent option from the other scans to set it to read SMART information only on set intervals, like ten minutes, when you have set the drives to spin down after nine minutes of idle, allowing the reach the sleep mode in the first place?

 

I run a large HTPC setup with nearly a dozen mechanical storage hard drives and it’s important for me that unused disks can go to sleep. If the program does not have those options can it be set not to read SMART at all without disabling anything else?

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It all depends on the actual HDD firmware solution, whether reading SMART attributes makes the drive spin up. It is not a software issue, but a firmware issue, that we cannot fix from AIDA64.

You can configure disk temperature polling frequency in AIDA64 / main menu / File / Preferences / Hardware Monitoring. Measuring disk temperature is done by SMART attributes readout.

Regards,

Fiery

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It all depends on the actual HDD firmware solution, whether reading SMART attributes makes the drive spin up. It is not a software issue, but a firmware issue, that we cannot fix from AIDA64.

You can configure disk temperature polling frequency in AIDA64 / main menu / File / Preferences / Hardware Monitoring. Measuring disk temperature is done by SMART attributes readout.

Regards,

Fiery

 

I did not know that some hard drives allow SMART scan without waking up the drive. A simple yet brilliant concept that I had not dared to hope since I have not come across with one. There are software that both allows to set the SMART scan time interval and then does not wake up drives in sleep and only reads values from running drives, making it possible for drives to go into sleep and stay that way, at least the once I know that are interrupted by SMART scan. One example I know to give you is the Hard Disk Sentinel, which I’ve been using long time to safe guard my data:

 

http://i58.tinypic.com/33artwp.jpg

 

Are you saying that even if you configure the disk temperature polling frequency in AIDA64 longer than the set idle spin down time to sleep mode for disks it will wake all the drives not supporting SMART scan while in sleep at every scan? If so can you disable the SMART scans entirely and simply not utilize the drive monitoring features of the program?

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The option that you've indicated with a red box on your screen shot is available in AIDA64 as well, as I've mentioned above ;)

You can completely disable SMART polling in AIDA64 / main menu / File / Preferences / Stability. Just remove the check next to Low-level SMART operations.

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