Speccy thrashing my disks

[Guest Keatah]

Speccy is constantly doing "something" and accessing my C: disk in my old system. What a cacophony of noise!

 

The way I see it, is, once Speccy has gathered all the data and done what it needs to do, it should go quiescent. Why does it need to stay busy?

[Mike2]

Have you tried uninstalling Speccy and downloading a fresh copy and reinstalling?

[Guest Keatah]

Yeh. I'm using the portable "version". It's not so much a thrashing as it is a constant writing. Then a pause, then more writing. Back and forth.

 

As soon as I close Speccy (and it is the only app running and there is +700mb free) the disk activity stops.

[Nergal]

Speccy has a number of live sensors it shouldn't be trashing a disc though.

Could you maybe define what you mean?

High CPU usage?

Many read writes to disc?

high disc usage?

A literal crunching sound coming from the hard disc unit.

misread last post.

can you run it in debug mode and work your way through the sections?

Edited June 22, 2013 by Nergal

[Guest Keatah]

The problem seems to be located in the UPDATE SMART DATA subsection of the ANALYZE HD DATA node.

 

If I leave speccy running it will generate an enormous log, of which 99% is this repeating line:

 

[2013-06-22 05:56:02] [iNFO ] CSmartMonitor::GetSmartAttribute retreive SMART data by sending ATA command

[2013-06-22 05:56:04] [iNFO ] CSmartMonitor::GetSmartAttribute retreive SMART data by sending ATA command

[2013-06-22 05:56:04] [iNFO ] CSmartMonitor::GetSmartAttribute retreive SMART data by sending ATA command

[2013-06-22 05:56:05] [iNFO ] CSmartMonitor::GetSmartAttribute retreive SMART data by sending ATA command

[2013-06-22 05:56:05] [iNFO ] CSmartMonitor::GetSmartAttribute retreive SMART data by sending ATA command

[2013-06-22 05:56:06] [iNFO ] CSmartMonitor::GetSmartAttribute retreive SMART data by sending ATA command

...

 

And on and on it goes. Keeps polling for smart data or something whatever.

[Alan_B]

Perhaps it keeps on asking because the replies are missing or invalid.

 

Have you checked the Smart Data with any other utility ?

[Guest Keatah]

I have tried HD Tune Pro which reads smart data from both disks. It's working fine. And I tried this and Speccy on 2 different systems. So there is high confidence the issue with with Speccy.

 

It seems that Speccy is polling the disks every 10 seconds or so in older versions, at least in 1.21.491. So therefore I didn't notice it.

 

In this new version 1.22.536 disk polling takes place every second, or even faster. And thus it is constantly writing a log or causing disk activity. Some disks do internal activity when SMART is polled.

 

And in the case of error, and I don't think that's happening here, Speccy should go quiescent and alert the user.

 

I don't understand the reasoning behind why disks have to be queried realtime every second?? It doesn't make sense. Any program that does this should have a user-definable interval and/or default to 1-minute or more.