How to monitor how often a drive is spinning up

[Clocker]

Howdy,
The HDD in my machine is set to go to sleep after about 1hr of idle time. It does that but I have noticed that once in a while it will just spin up for no apparent reason. It is just a data drive with no swap file or any system files of any significance on it.

I'm wondering how often this really happens. If it's a lot I would probably just disable the spin-down all together. I have looked at SMART monitoring to see spin up count but the data provided seems useless, usually in hex format or something and it seems just to state if the number is within an acceptable range rather than the actual number of spin ups.

Any idea on how to monitor how often my HDD is spinning up?

Thanks,
Clocker

 

[LunarMist]

Howdy,
The HDD in my machine is set to go to sleep after about 1hr of idle time. It does that but I have noticed that once in a while it will just spin up for no apparent reason. It is just a data drive with no swap file or any system files of any significance on it.

I'm wondering how often this really happens. If it's a lot I would probably just disable the spin-down all together. I have looked at SMART monitoring to see spin up count but the data provided seems useless, usually in hex format or something and it seems just to state if the number is within an acceptable range rather than the actual number of spin ups.

Any idea on how to monitor how often my HDD is spinning up?

Thanks,
Clocker

Oops...

 

[ddrueding]

SMART would be the place to look. Perhaps a different monitoring tool that could translate the information? What make/model of drive is it?

 

[Clocker]

It's one of the 3tb Seagates available on Amazon.

 

[Clocker]

Turns out Hard Disk Sentinel will give an actual number for start/stops (instead of some Hex value) that appears to work. You have to dig through some settings and tweak it a bit.

It increments when I refresh the data after a known stop/start of the spindles. I'll let it run for a day or two and see what happens.