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Aquasuite service prevents HDDs from spinning down if monitoring is enabled

Dienstag, 25. Februar 2020, 23:14

After moving my storage devices to a new system using an Aquaero device, I noticed my HDDs would not longer spin down after the expected idle time. Changing the setting to 1 minute in Windows and even offlining the drives made no difference.
I resorted to using Procmon to inspect which programs were accessing storage device information directly, and the Aquasuite service showed up. It seems to be reading SMART information every minute when the "Hard Drive" monitoring option is enabled.
For now disabling that monitoring option and restarting the service has restored the expected idling behaviour, but I would guess there are many users that are not aware of this effect.
I believe it would be a good idea to avoid fetching SMART information continuously from HDDs, or (if possible) skip it when drives are idle.

System information:

Windows 10 Pro
Aquasuite X.12
Aquaero 6 LT

Mittwoch, 26. Februar 2020, 13:16

There's no other option. You can only disable HDD monitoring.

Mittwoch, 4. März 2020, 00:41

Should the option be disabled by default then? This has a pretty negative effect on PC acoustics, and possibly HDD life (for drives that are spun down most of the time)
edit: also, other hardware monitoring programs don't have the same effect. They must be doing something different that Aquasuite is not. To start with, there is no need to fetch SMART information every minute.

Dieser Beitrag wurde bereits 1 mal editiert, zuletzt von »danielkza« (4. März 2020, 00:42)

Mittwoch, 4. März 2020, 07:20

This has a pretty negative effect on PC acoustics, and possibly HDD life (for drives that are spun down most of the time)
The most of or customers use SSD.

Donnerstag, 5. März 2020, 02:17

> The most of or customers use SSD.


I use SSDs *and* HDDs because they have different applications. You cannot easily get 4TB+ SSDs for cheap, bulk storage.

I'm having a hard time understanding your objections. A monitoring program should have the least impact possible in the system being monitored, and this is a clear negative impact that I bothered to triage and point out how to avoid.
All that is needed is to check if the device is powered on before loading information using WMI (as that what seems to be used by Aquasuite). GetDevicePowerState will do the job, it's probably a 20 line fix to the software that will save users thousands of hours in HDD life.