And it's coming along!



The Winstep service, once it gets a request to retrieve SMART data for specific drives, begins doing this independently. This way, however long it takes to retrieve the data, it does not normally interfere with or slow down the main application (or even block it if a drive takes too long to respond).

So as to not flood drives with SMART requests (some controllers return data very fast and can be polled once per second, but some cheap USB bridges crap out if you over do it) the service only refreshes the SMART data once every 30 seconds, regardless of how many times per second the main application (or others also using the service) request it.

It also internally maintains a list of drives to "service" and if SMART data is not requested by the main application for a specific drive in a certain amount of time, the drive is "dropped" from the list.

This ensures that the service does not keep on mindlessly trying to get SMART data for a specific drive long after the user has removed it from the main application. Likewise, if there are no requests from the main application for over 1 minute, the service goes idle and stops retrieving data for all drives.

If a drive takes too long to respond to a SMART request, it gets put on a "slow poll" list and only queried once every 5 minutes (unless the situation resolved itself, at which point it goes back to being queried once every 30 seconds).

If a specific drive does not return SMART data at all, after 3 retries it gets put on a "Do not poll" list so no more time is wasted on it.

For peace of mind since this is a new feature and there is a potential for trouble, I am also going to add a "Do not get SMART data" setting to the Disk Meter module settings panel.

All very SMART! Kudos,, Jorge.

You can now select what info the icon displays from the following choices:

None
Percent Free
Percent Used
Total Capacity
Free Space
Used Space
Temperature
Lifetime Remaining
Read Speed
Write Speed

You can have both fields of info, just one, or even none.


Now I'm going to start thinking about the choices for the desktop version of the module.

First obvious choice is which drives should the module display info about (a list of available drives and you can checkmark the ones you want).

Second if each drive info in the desktop module is stacked horizontally or vertically (the single desktop module will display info for several drives, each drive section stacked on top or next to the other).

The other choices have to do with which information is displayed and if a graph should be displayed for read and write speed (bytes written/read per second).

I have to think hard about this, but it is going well so far. Any other suggestions, feel free.

All excellent. Info-wise, perhaps have an option for total read/written?

Already getting Bytes Read/sec and Bytes Written/sec for each drive too.

Basically the only thing left to do is desktop module stuff... and tie some loose ends.

Everything seems to be coming together well and nicely so. Just wondering, will the desktop mod be freeform skinnable?

Aren't they all?

Glad to see.

Ok, the disk activity led is now also working properly.

I settled for a single color (green) but it has three levels of brightness according to through output. The heavier the drive usage, the brighter the led is.

I also decided to, in a way, "fake it": instead of polling the drive for activity 10 times per second, I only poll it once to get the read/write bytes per second info we also need for other stats. If there is drive activity during that second (i.e. read + writes > 0) then the led for that drive is made to flicker (I could say randomly, but it isn't as there is actually a pattern to it) for the next second. The user won't know any better and showing what really matters (the presence of drive activity) is accomplished, with minimum overhead.

Also, all of this is heavily optimized as usual. For instance, through-output is only polled if it is actually being shown somewhere (i.e. either as one of the metrics for icons, or the Drive Information dialog is open, or the disk desktop module is showing this info). Likewise, module icons are only updated when strictly necessary and only those that actually had some changes.

All of this makes eminent good sense. Bravo, Jorge!

For the default disk meter desktop module I am going to do a iStats style module... something a bit like this:



Of course, instead of different meter types as in the image above, each section will display info about a specific drive.

What I really like about it is the blue sideways bar at the left edge. Titles and graph lines use the same color as this bar.

Winstep modules do not have buttons, but I can use the space in the bar to display the text "Disk Meter" vertically (localized, of course, not bitmap). This way the sidebar still acts as a "anchor" for the whole module and the user can select which color the bar is (and therefore the section titles, graph lines, etc) .

Not sure if I should add a "glass frame" around the whole thing as in the iCal (gray) desktop calendar module though...

Ah, and we can have a "light" version of the module, where the background is white instead of black and the outline is a black line instead of white.

Hmmm... I'm thinking that I could add an option to show the primary (or secondary?) metric at the top of the icon instead of both side by side? The problem with the latter is that text size can become so small it is almost unreadable, the problem with the former is that text at the top will partially obscure the top of the icon (which as it currently is has been shifted up a bit to make room for text at the bottom).

So, in terms of potential backgrounds for the desktop disk meter module, two possible choices so far (don't forget these would stretch horizontally to accommodate several drives). Which would you like best?

First choice based on iStat, second choice based on the existing iFlip Calendar module background.




I could not get ChatGPT not to crop the left side of the container, but this should give you guys an idea of what it would look like (of course, with the Winstep disk icons instead of those place holders):

Man, you are clever. (bows)
I also prefer the istat4.png glass placeholder, but that's just me.
You can always allow color and hue options for the user which I think you already mentioned earlier?

Looking great Jorge.
I'd love to do a closed BETA test on this.