Unable to standby disks while Scanner Service is running.

[TrendyWhistle]

Hi guys!

I'm having the following issue and have spent a couple days trying multiple settings to try and resolve it.

Scanner's "Do not query if the disk has spun down" doesn't seem to work for me. Scanner still wakes disks from standby, including disks that Scanner itself put into standby.

PC Specs:

Scanner 2.6.13.4088
Windows 11 (build 26200)
ASUS ROG Strix X570-E, Ryzen 7 5800X

8 spinning disks (all on motherboard SATA):

• • • 4x TOSHIBA HDWQ140 (4TB)
    • 1x ST12000NM0007 (excluded from testing because the drive is damaged)
    • 2x ST14000NM001G (Exos X16)
    • 1x ST8000NE0021

Summary

With ScannerService running, any disk placed in standby is woken within seconds. With ScannerService stopped and nothing else changed, every disk holds standby indefinitely. "Do not query if the disk has spun down" is enabled.

Testing

I used Scanner's "Put into Standby" command on all 7 disks, then monitored power state with smartctl (using -n standby). All 7 entered standby. All 7 were then woken by Scanner, 38 to 71 seconds later, in the same serial order every time. The "do not query if spun down" option does not appear to prevent the query

I also tested setting windows power plan's hard drive standby to 1 minute, and scanner's throttle queries to 2 minutes, the drives never went on standby at all.

These settings didn't seem to affect anything:

• • Per-disk "Do not use Direct I/O when querying S.M.A.R.T."
  • Per-disk "Query the power mode directly from the disk"
  • Advanced Settings: DirectIOOverride off

Standby works when scanner service is disabled.

ScannerService stopped: all 7 tested disks held standby for at least 150s of me checking.
ScannerService running: all 7 woke, at 54s / 62s / 69s / 76s / 91s / 103s / 113s.

Other problem services (all fixed now i think)

• • Drivepool - was waking disks instantly until I set BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect to false, found this on one of the forum posts.
  • Fancontrol/LibreHardwareMonitor - was waking the disks every 60 seconds, but fixed when disabling drive monitoring.
  • HWInfo - also waking the disks during monitoring so i disabled it.
     

Scanner Logs:

The Scanner service log was filling with "Unable to find the PhysicalDisk performance counter instance for disk '\\.\PHYSICALDRIVEn'" warnings for every disk except the boot drive, retried roughly once per second. Windows PhysicalDisk counters were broken on this system (only the 😄 instance existed). I repaired them with diskperf -Y, lodctr /R and winmgmt /resyncperf. All 12 instances returned and Scanner's Performance / Disk Queue / Disk Active % columns repopulated.

This did not change the wake behaviour — the same sweep continued afterwards — but not sure why this happened either. (scanner logs not included because it was 20MB large with the error, looked like the whole log was only filled with that error.

Let me know if there's anything useful I can provide that'll help identify any issues! I hope this message wasn't too long and messy haha. Also let me know if this is more appropriate as a support ticket instead! Thank you for taking a look at my issue.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

In the Scanner settings, in the SMART tab, check the "Throttle queries" option.  This will reduce the frequency that SMART queries occur, which can/will wake up the drive and systems.  

For StableBit DrivePool, the beta version has completely overhauled the bitlocker detection to fix the sleep issue:

Quote

Build .1744

• Issue #29129 Implemented a more efficient BitLocker volume unlock detection method that does not prevent drives from going to sleep.
  • This new method listens for PnP events. If anything goes wrong, it will fall back to WMI-based polling.
  • Can be disabled with a new advanced setting, BitLocker_FileSystemMountDetect (default: true).
  • The BitLocker_PoolPartUnlockDetect advanced setting, which controls WMI-based detection, now defaults to false.

 

 

[TrendyWhistle]

Hi!

Thanks for the info, I will try drivepool's beta branch.

For Scanner, if I set the throttle queries to 30 minutes for example, does that mean that the drive will still wake up every 30 minutes? And is there some sort of condition for "Do not query if the disk has spun down" that I'm not meeting/are there any known issues with this feature at the moment?

Thank you!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

In the SMART settings, there is an option to "Do not query if the disk has spun down".   Make sure that's checked.  

And also, double check the power management settings to verify when it spins down drives.  The "Turn off hard drives after" setting.  If this is larger than the SMART throttling option, then it could keep the drive active.  Eg, you'd want the power management setting to be something like 20 minutes, but the SMART throttling to be 30 minutes.