PSA: Monitoring HDD temps increases HDD temps!

I didn't know this and I discovered it by accident. Apparently by polling for a temperature every so often, software such as SpeedFan or Aida64 actually prevents hard drives from entering sleep mode. Every time the drive gets polled for a temperature, the idle timer resets, so the HDD never actually spins down into sleep mode.

I've always monitored my system temps. I was never aware of this downside before. I would bet my long idle power consumption is higher when using these programs since my current system has 3 HDDs and 2 SDDs. I don't know if the idle power on the SDDs is affected, but it certainly affects the HDDs. Idle HDD temps after a long idle with no temperature monitor running are now 7-9 deg C cooler than they were before. This was measured by launching such an app after a long idle. Temps then rise steadily from there over the course of the next hour with the app running, leveling off where I'm used to seeing them.

This was an unexpected discovery for me, though in hindsight it does make sense. I just want to make sure the rest of you are aware of it as well. I'm using Win8.1 x64 but I'm sure it affects all Windows versions and Linux OSes the same.

Interesting, i never notice that, and i only monitor my system temp every time i do some heavily ocing

Truth. Makes complete sense doesn't it? Besides, who wants sleep temps of the drive??!

Thanks for posting!

ASUS ROG said:

Interesting, i never notice that, and i only monitor my system temp every time i do some heavily ocing

Click to expand...

Based on how it all works, I'm guessing you'd only really notice if you were running multiple HDDs in one system, which is something I'm guessing you don't do when you're doing heavy benching. The OS accesses the system drive often enough to keep it awake, it's the storage drives that are being kept awake unnecessarily by the temperature monitoring.