Monitoring prevents disks from spinning down

[Callistemon]

As part of the Warning Window Blocks Monitoring error, I discovered that HWiNFO Sensors prevents external HDDs from spinning down after inactivity. One of these times, a built-in warning window was displayed, and the disks were spun down. Closing the warning box immediately caused the disks to spin up again. Would there be any way ignore disks that are spun down, and only monitor when the disks are detected to already be spinning? As for when the disks are already spinning, the monitoring constantly resets the clock for inactivity. Possibly a spindown command could be sent to the disks if the disk had no activity in the last 30 minutes (something which is already monitored in the proprietary program), with monitoring occurring immediately until then.

 

[Martin]

This has been discussed several times on this forum. You can increase the Disk S.M.A.R.T. polling period, or try to disable "ATA Statistics Support" if that's causing it.

 

[Callistemon]

If the polling period was 32 minutes, the disks would be able to spin down for 2 minutes before spinning back up again for another 30 minutes, assuming the spindown time is 30 minutes. Even if the time until spindown was longer, the interval would be the same unless the polling period was even longer. Spindowns don't need to be thoroughly avoided, but spinning up every 30 minutes isn't ideal. If the disk is spundown, the polling period for that disk could be infinite.

The SSD belongs to the same SMART category, and requires the polling frequency be at least once every 8 seconds since it heats up so fast, which is too short to allow disks to spindown. ATA Statistics are only displayed in the Main section and don't appear to refresh continuously. It's more likely to be SMART attributes, which are constantly monitored for errors.