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Hard Disk Sentinel PRO - Mini-Review

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peterlonz:
One thing that becomes clear reading thro' the above is that most of you have avery good technical grasp of your computers & associated hardware etc.
My objection TO HDSPro is that the process of setting the configuration for your own application is a very significant task & I became weary of all the tech stuff I had to consider just to do a half pie job of configuring.
For example you can arrange an eamail warning to yourself - not a bad idea - but how many of us can quickly do that - not me, it would take me some time to find the relevent info.
I could go on but in truth I have no degree of certainty that what I have done will be effective or at least as effctive as possible - this is not good.
I think a set of default configuration options should be inbuilt to cater for lesser mortals.
Also the above identifies a bug - what's the response from the authors?

IainB:
...Also the above identifies a bug - what's the response from the authors?
-peterlonz (June 30, 2012, 02:00 AM)
--- End quote ---
Oops, I don't think we had identified a bug in HDS.
There were only two things I can think of that you might be referring to:

* Case studies: The developer (Janos) at Hard Disk Sentinel sent me a link to some cases of problems discovered using HDS (that means examples/logs of hard drive problems which HDS has discovered on users' computers):
They are under Support -> Knowledge base -> Hard disk cases, here: http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_cases.php
* Real-time performance monitoring: Registry settings necessary to enable this are not set by HDS, the user has to set them. When I set them, they were not sticking, so real-time performance monitoring in HDS was not enabled, or kept being disabled. I gave a quick ad hoc registry fix for it - documented in the opening post. Something - and I don't see how it could be HDS - is occasionally clearing the registry settings that enable this - they are not "sticky" at any rate. I suspect (but have no proof) that it might be CCleaner as that also seems to be responsible for occasionally knocking out the registry settings affecting xplorer² on my laptop. (I have a quick ad hoc registry fix for that too.)

IainB:
It looks as though the real-time performance monitoring registry settings, necessary for enabling HDS Pro's disk performance monitoring, appear to be getting deleted under these specific circumstances:

* the laptop disk powers-down (part of battery power conservation scheme);
* the laptop goes into "sleep" or other inactive mode;
* the laptop is rebooted.
CCleaner does not so far appear to be implicated.

I suspect that this may be a laptop-only issue and that PCs (as opposed to laptops with battery power conservation settings) would not suffer from these effects.

IainB:
Just made a few updates to the Opening Post and added this edit:

EDIT 2012-09-17:
Hooray! This seems to be an effective fix to the episodic real-time performance monitoring issue:
(for more info., refer HDS FAQ page http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php)

The real time performance monitoring worked per the Registry settings workaround (see earlier edit below), but after some time (for example after connecting/removing external hard disk, pendrive or similar storage device) it stopped working and I periodically had to reset the Registry settings - i.e., the Registry settings change did not "stick". This was apparently caused by a function in HDS which provides for performance monitoring when a new device - e.g., an external hard disk - is connected/detected. When this happens, Hard Disk Sentinel has a function that clears the performance object cache and re-detects the performance objects. On some systems (regardless of hardware configuration) this function apparently causes the Windows performance monitoring settings in the Registry to be disabled.

If this happens, you can disable this HDS function as follows:

* 1. click "start" (Windows) button and to the search field enter REGEDIT
* 2. open REGEDIT
* 3. navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\HD Sentinel (or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\HD Sentinel under 32 bit Windows), where you will see a lot of keys.
* 4. create a new STRING key named DisablePerfCacheClear and specify a value of 1 for that.Then restart HDS, which now will not issue this special function to clear the performance object cache when it detects the change of configuration, so the performance counters will continue working normally - once reset in the Registry. Those Registry settings should now "stick" and not need to be reset again.    :Thmbsup:
--- End quote ---

rgdot:
A post from the future   :o

(It's still 16th here)

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