Watermark HDD information list all hard drives

[wmmiller]

Fred,

Would it be possible for the watermark HDD information list to list all hard drives in the system? It would be nice to see the work hours on them all at a glance.

Bill

[Xander]

Can I do an addendum here:

On my own system:
"HDD: 931.5 GB (Hitachi HD________ SCSI DISK)"

But, that's actually my D: drive showing up and not my C: at all. But that's for another day....
I'd like to see:
"HDD: C: 214GB/500GB. 4000hrs, 'OK' " <--show how full, hours, SMART status.
"HDD: D: 931GB/1000GB. 6500hrs. 'OK' "

[Charger440]

For upgrade options I consider spindle speed important as well but not sure if that is doable.....

[Fred]

Hi guys.

There seems to be some misunderstanding here. When this feature was requested, I explicitly asked if I should display the capacity of the hard disk or the size of each partition. The hard disk capacity was chosen. viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1015

Now you want the size of the partitions. That's fine by me, but it does not make sense to show power hours count or SMART failure prediction for a partition, because one hard disk may have several partitions (C. D: E: F: etc).

Xander, I agree that HDD: C: 214GB/500GB. 4000hrs, 'OK' is more neat, but someone using this feature for the first time wouldn't have any idea of what 4000hrs, 'OK' means. I find the current format is much more intuitive.

So guys, please think about this, and decide what you want.

[wmmiller]

I don’t really give a crap about listing partitions myself. The size of the drives and the hour on count and the fail/no fail is nice.

[Fred]

Hi Bill. Do you have more that one physical hard disk, then? I didn't make this feature list more than one drive because it's rare to find a machine with more than one hard disk. Laptops only have one, that's sure.

[wmmiller]

The small electrical contractor I help out has two drives in their office desktops. Their files are saved on the additional hard drive in the box. They were there when I came around. Their bids, estimate and job site pictures get pretty large. I guess the people that used to help them decided to add a 2TB second drive instead of one large drive. In the big scheme of life, it’s really not that important there are other programs to check on these with.

You shouldn’t add it if it’s a pile of work or if I’m the only one who may use it.

[Brink]

I know you were asking Bill, but I'd like to chime in and say: I don't find it rare for machines to have more than one drive. Laptops, sure it's rare but there are some. This is especially true of some of the more modern laptops/tablets that have a microSD slot. The system sees the SD as a "drive" and it would be nice to see that at a glance on the watermark. As for desktop machines, it's quite common in my experience to find multiple drives installed. Some times it's set up as RAID mirror for redundancy. In that case. the second drive does not even appear in the drive letter list.

[Xander]

Now you want the size of the partitions. That's fine by me, but it does not make sense to show power hours count or SMART failure prediction for a partition, because one hard disk may have several partitions (C. D: E: F: etc).

Nobody before your reply mentioned partitions. In my own post, I have two hard drives in my system so that's my C & D. Only the D is listed but I'll post that to Bug Reports in a bit.

Xander, I agree that HDD: C: 214GB/500GB. 4000hrs, 'OK' is more neat, but someone using this feature for the first time wouldn't have any idea of what 4000hrs, 'OK' means. I find the current format is much more intuitive.

Isn't that why we have Help pages and documentation? Though I would actually think that a technician should be able to guess what "4000hrs" would mean in context of a drive.

[Charger440]

Bill

Have you considered the option of a RAID NAS for that electrical company? Things can be centrally located and/or backup to it. Seems like that might be important stuff and I firmly believe in a local backup. A cloudl back up is a good idea too but downloading gigabytes of data from the net as opposed to the local network could take quit some time if the need was to arise...

[wmmiller]

Yes I’ve considered many things for them but it’s really hard to pin anyone down on anything. It’s a family business and there are many cooks in the kitchen. They do have several NAS drives. They all do work on their office computers and home computers and sometimes I wonder if any of them talk to each other. I’ve been hounding them to get some offsite backups going on. Between their houses, the office and their shop there are many ways things could be offsite for each computer. I sort of gave up hounding them.

[Fred]

Nobody before your reply mentioned partitions.

That's not true. You did. several times. Here are some of them:

But, that's actually my D: drive showing up and not my C: at all. But that's for another day....
I'd like to see:
"HDD: C: 214GB/500GB. 4000hrs, 'OK' " <--show how full, hours, SMART status.
"HDD: D: 931GB/1000GB. 6500hrs. 'OK' "

C: and D: are partitions (or volumes, if you prefer). They could be both located in the same drive, which is what usually happens. A technician should know about those things, too.

In your case, if those volumes are in two different physical hard disks and C: is mounted in a flash drive, then D: being showed up instead of C: is not a bug. Hard disk devices are accessed by their index, usually in the following order: IDE->SATA->USB. Desktop watermark currently shows the first one.

If it were to show the HDD info in the HDD: D: 931GB/1000GB. 6500hrs. 'OK' format, which drive letter should it show for multi-volume hard disks (with several drive letters)? Also, if it tells the capacity of the hard disk, wouldn't placing C: in that line make users think the size referred to the partition instead, giving them erroneous info?

I didn't make any help page for the Desktop watermark yet, and I honestly don't think I would need to. Such simple feature should be intuitive and not need to make users have to go reading a page to know what the fields mean.

[Xander]

As I explained, Fred, those are two separate physical hard drives (technically three as C: is in RAID). Again, I didn't once use the word "partition", you inferred that.

(Beyond that, partitions on the same drive would have the same hours of use)

I don't know about the other guys here but I rarely see partitioned drives. If there's a D: drive at all, it's either a recovery partition or the old physical drive from their previous system.

Regardless, this seems to be another example of where a request is made and you somehow seem to be taking offense at it and getting defensive. I have no idea why you would suggest that I'm running my main PC off of a flash drive - that seems to be coming out of nowhere.

[Charger440]

The wording of the HD info on the newest watermark, I find it confusing. Using "Failing: NO" had me double checking a drive. because I thought it was failing. Can we just use "Good" or "Failing" and maybe, possibly change them to green and red respectively? Just spit balling here but I find the format confusing.

[Xander]

How does it get the order? My PC calls them 0,1,2 but they show up as 1,2,0

Could displaying USBs be optional? On machines other than my own, 99% of the time, the only USBs plugged in will be my own.

[Fred]

Hi Xander.

UVK enumerates the drives using the CreateFile() function and passing "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0", "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1", "\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE2" and so on, as explained in the documentation.

When opening a physical drive x:, the lpFileName string should be the following form: "\\.\PhysicalDriveX". Hard disk numbers start at zero. The following table shows some examples of physical drive strings.
String Meaning
"\\.\PhysicalDrive0" Opens the first physical drive.
"\\.\PhysicalDrive2" Opens the third physical drive.

I assume the Windows Disk management snap-in enumerates them differently, placing the system drive as the first disk, and removable drives at the end.

The way they are enumerated by UVK should coincide with the way they are enumerated by the device manager.

I can easily skip enumeration of USB interfaced drives, but won't that also skip flash memory cards?

[Xander]

I'm not bothered by the order, just curious. But, thinking about it, if they are listed out differently between diskmgmt and the WM, is there an advantage to listing the numbers (0-2..)? If I start to mess around with a DOS command setting active partitions on drive0 (when it's listed elsewhere as drive1).... that could do more harm than good, couldn't it? Would it be safer just to replace "HDD0" with its drive letter?

An option to exclude removables would skip flash cards but, on my bench, the only removable drives in play are my own.

[Fred]

Not really. Drive letters can also be changed, and moved to different hard drives. And again, which drive letter would you display for multi-volume drives?

It may also be a bug in the last beta. I can't say for sure, I've already made many changes and I did find some bugs, but don't remember how it was. I will upload a new beta tomorrow so you guys can test and check it out.

[Fred]

Xander, you still didn't answer this question:

I can easily skip enumeration of USB interfaced drives, but won't that also skip flash memory cards?

[Xander]

I did: "An option to exclude removables would skip flash cards but, on my bench, the only removable drives in play are my own."
When a machine is on my bench, I don't have client's SD cards plugged into them, only my own flash drives and I don't need to see those. Other techs may want them listed but that's why I'm suggesting it as togglable in the settings. I'm also assuming you're not talking about SSDs because those aren't removable.

Drives letters -can- be changed but, really, most end users don't. And they're not too likely to change by accident while we're working on them, are they?
IF a single physical drive is partitioned, couldn't that be listed as "C/D"? That's what it would be probably 99% of the time anyway.