W3J HDD Light Activity: Please Vote!!

After using three different hard drives from three different manufactures (Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Seagate) the results are all the same. My HDD light pulses almost continuously even when idle.

I removed all the bloatware, have spybot and adaware installed and I still get the same results. Even after a clean install of XP Home, my machine still exhibits this problem.

I am trying to find out how many other W3J users or Asus users for that matter experience this phenomenon with their laptop.

 

When idle any computers hard drive will be working, it doesnt stop because the computer is idle, albeit the hard drive activity should be alot less than if you were actually using it as long as you dont have any other non windows programs running in the background

 

Yes, I think it's normal. It happens in my W3J also. Don't worry too much... I guess?

 

Mine blinks even on idle, but not as much as when its reading/writing data.

Seriously, I dont even take notice of it, until now!

LOL

 

I think I said this on several threads other than this one:

the HDD blinking is related to Windows services, among which the main culprit is the Indexing Service, but others as well.

It is not related to the type of HDD, not related to the type of notebook or in general hardware at all. It's an OS characteristic (granted an annoying one).

 

yea same here.

This guy is so paranoid its not the first time he worries about little things on his w3j. First it was heat, then light leakage, now hdd blinking light.........

 

disable the indexing service it gives you a small performance boost and its basically worthless anyways

 

There's good news tonight:

In power control, I set my hard drive to spin down after 3 minutes -- and, get this -- it did. That meant the flickering light did not indicate R/W activity!!

Diskmon indicates no R/W activity during idle (not spin down) time!

Further, the flicker continued during the spin down. Repeat: The flicker continued during the spin down.

No flicker with W98 or MS-DOS startup disks.

But -- the good news is that there is no R/W activity indicated by the light flicker and no excessive wear on the hard drive head assembly. Rest easy on that score.

Thought you'd like to know!

chastee

BTW: three yes votes: 3 different mobo, 3 different brands of HDD.

 

Wow, talk about digging out an old thread.

HDD LED flicker is completely normal on any modern day Windows Operating system. The paging file as well as many other needed Windows services do access the hard disk even when the system is IDLE (it's never completely 0% CPU usage)