Serious problem in monitoring multiple HD temps!

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 2:14 am

Speedfan only shows one of my HD temps, so I emailed the author and he suggested that the problem is with the driver; I assumed he meant the driver for the SATA controller. Both drives are Samsung SP2504Cs and connect to the same VIA controller. I tried looking at the SMART data in DTemp & Everest and it shows two drives but both with the same Serial Number. Therefore, it looks as if Speedfan is working around the chipset driver bug, whilst the other programs incorrectly show data for two drives when in fact they are simply duplicating the data from one. This could be a serious issue if the drive that isnâ€™t actually being monitored is running much hotter than the one that is. Temperature differentials arenâ€™t unusual in cases such as the P180 with its multiple drive bays.

The motherboard that is giving this problem is an Asus A8V deluxe, which has a VIA chipset which includes SATA & PATA controllers and a separate Promise controller. Iâ€™m not using the Promise controller as itâ€™s significantly slower, but Iâ€™ll test connecting one of the drives to it and see how temp monitoring works then.

Can anyone recommend another program for monitoring drive temps?

scorp · Post by **scorp** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 3:16 am

It isn't speedfan's fault; it's the VIA controller that messes up the SMART info; in fact the only SMART info that is posted by the VIA controller is the one from the drive connected to it's first SATA port;

ultraboy · Post by **ultraboy** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 4:45 am

You can try DTemp, though I think you'll face with similar issue as scorp suggested - it's the controller's fault.

I use both Speedfan and DTemp (in separate system - I mean

), and both have no problem reading SMART info from 2 Hdds.

psionic · Post by **psionic** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 5:56 am

My other system has an ASUS A8N Deluxe and I was able to get HDD temps using the latest version of HDDLife Pro.

It also allows you to set the AAM level on drives that support it.

http://www.hddlife.com/

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 9:59 am

Thanks for the replies, but please try reading the original post more thoroughly before replying, as some posts seemed redundant!

silon · Post by **silon** » Sat Jul 01, 2006 11:19 am

smilingcrow,

my previous system was built around the A8V and i was facing the same problem as well.

im sorry i cant provide you the link to this, but i read "somewhere" that most of the A8Vs ship with one defective sata controller. sometimes it would be the promise chip and sometimes the VIA chip itself. my A8V had a dead promise controller; im interested to know if yours is working

smilingcrow · Post by **smilingcrow** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 10:41 am

I hooked up one of the drives to the Promise controller and now I can read the SMART data for both drives in Speedfan & DTemp.
Kudos to Speedfan for detecting that there was only data for one drive available via the VIA controller. All the other utilities that I tried just duplicated the data from one drive.