Linux In 2020 Can Finally Provide Sane Monitoring Of SATA Drive Temperatures

[SilverBird775]

HDD temperature polling does affect its performance. Can't say the same about SSDs because I haven't tested that.

Oh, thats unfortunate. Perhaps it is causing by some SMART data renewing and cache flushing to fixate its inner state before reporting. There should be more direct and non invasive method (ATA SCT) to collect temperature data. I had no chance to observe the performance hit on my SSD (SATA-AHCI) because the sensor lib pick up the useless lifespan SMART attribute instead of temperature. Gnome disk's SMART report treating lifespan attribute as secondary temperature sensor as well.


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[starshipeleven]

HWiNFO does not need any "special drivers for sensors".

Yeah, because it is an application running as Administrator that supports the protocols and the bs on its own https://www.hwinfo.com/version-history/

How can you even claim it is different from Smartmontools or whatever other linux userspace application that runs as root and does stuff is beyond me

[starshipeleven]

And that's the reason, gentlemen, Linux has sucked, sucks and will always suck. For other OSes people usually just get work done ,e.g. HWiNFO reports everything on earth, no questions asked.

HWiNFO and any other application like that runs as Administrator, dumbass

[starshipeleven]

You can find hundreds of people to test sensors for a CPU family.

where were you when he asked for testers?

[Jigglywiggly]

To be honest, he's right, just loading up hwinfo on Windows shows literally every sensor there is on your computer. It is much easier to get rpm readouts, voltages, temperatures on Windows than Linux.

[tildearrow]

There was the whole drama with the it87 driver some time ago, and it was mostly due to lack of interest/users/testers.

*raises hand*

[birdie]

Does this affect drive performance? I've noticed that reading temps with smartctl slows down I/O significantly. E.g. scrubs might take 3x as long. My SATA3 drives seem to pause all I/O while replying to the smartctl queries.

HDD temperature polling does affect its performance. Can't say the same about SSDs because I haven't tested that.

[birdie]

Does HWiNFO really report "everything on earth"? Last I checked some motherboards still need special drivers for sensors to properly work on Windows. The Windows user base interested in such things is far larger too, so "just get the work done" is a bit easier.
There was the whole drama with the it87 driver some time ago, and it was mostly due to lack of interest/users/testers.

HWiNFO does not need any "special drivers for sensors". It works right out of the box after you install Windows without installing any drivers whatsoever.

It needs AMD/NVIDIA drivers to monitor GPUs though but it's because NVIDIA and AMD closely guard their HW interfaces and only expose them via their own proprietary APIs.

God, why are there so many stupid open source fanatics here?

[caligula]

You can find hundreds of people to test sensors for a CPU family.

I think the problem is, there's no user friendly communication interface between sensors developer(s) and ordinary users. Most ordinary users don't know which package & driver provides the temp info. The distros decorate this data with user interfaces and also try to hide the backend implementation to help with confused users. So it's highly unlikely that people talk with the developers. The first I visited lm-sensors pages was when I needed the driver for first gen Zen. That was more than 15 years after I started with Linux.

[caligula]

Does this affect drive performance? I've noticed that reading temps with smartctl slows down I/O significantly. E.g. scrubs might take 3x as long. My SATA3 drives seem to pause all I/O while replying to the smartctl queries.