m2adel / pinghd

A cross-platform, and standalone tool to prevent all of your hard drives from entering auto-sleep mode.

PingHD

A simple cross-platform, no-dependency tool to keep your hard drive alive.

• Make sure to read the info tab before using this tool by clicking on 'Info(?)' button.

I decided to create this tool as other similar tools that are out there are only built for Windows. This tool was written using FPC/Lazarus which allows for a simple cross-platform deployment.

FPC supports a huge list of platforms, just install fpc compiler for your OS and compile the project with it to produce a single, stand-alone executable of this tool.

Binary executables for Windows and Linux (compiled on Ubuntu 19.10 and Lazarus 2.0.2+dfsg-2 rDebian package 2.0.2+dfsg-2 FPC 3.0.4 x86_64-linux-gtk2) are provided below:

• Windows binary https://github.com/m2adel/PingHD/releases/download/0.1/PingHD.zip

• Linux binary https://github.com/m2adel/PingHD/releases/download/0.1.0/PingHD.tar.xz

pinghd's Issues

[Suggestion] Restore last used write interval from PingHD.txt file upon restart of PingHD.exe

Hello Mr. Mahmoud Adel,

I have started using your tool since some weeks because of a very specific annoyance with an application that on its own startup would cause a Windows Dynamic Disk Stripe Set (2 HDDs, Windows Software RAID0) to make a strange 5-time repetitive HDD head cycle noise if the disk is "parked" or at least in some kind of power saving state.

The first curious thing is that the application itself is installed on my main OS drive (NVME SSD) and normally wouldn't have any reason to access any other disk in the system ... but well we all know how intrusive some applications have become, so i blame it on that...
And the second curious thing is that any other access (by myself or other applications) to this Dynamic Disk just spins it up normally without the 5-time head re-cycle. But this one application seems to be a special case...

When the disks are spinning and/or head is unparked then the issue does not occur.
-> So your tool helps with this perfectly while keeping it super simple and easy to use compared to other similar tools I found! Thank your for it.

Now my only minor inconvenience is that the write timer is not saved on restart of the tool. And I do not know if you still "maintain" this tool or planned to do adjustments at all to begin with. I guess implementing an extra config file would make things more complicated - especially if it is only for one option and also the fact that multiple instances with different requirements couldn't use a centralized config.
So maybe the possibility would be to at least save the write interval in the .txt-file generated by PingHD.exe and restoring the last used interval out of the text file (if available). That would make it portable for all instances and keep the logic rather simple without touching user profile config files etc..
Also I think with the interval being the only variable in the tool, saving it is really the only thing missing at the moment.

Kind Regards,
Red