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    XPS1645 Hard Drive Light blinks every second (source determined)

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by gpig, Apr 1, 2010.

  1. gpig

    gpig Notebook Deity

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    I got my XPS 1645 last week and ordered it with Windows 7 Home Premium to save money and installed my own copy of Windows 7 Professional. When I was installing drivers and applications, I noticed that the Intel Storage Matrix Manager (and also the Intel Rapid Storage Technology available on the Intel website) causes my hard drive activity light to blink every second or so.

    By reading about this issue, I learned that it is caused by the way the DVD/CD device is polled, or something like that, and the HDD light just represents this. There is not really any hard drive activity occurring every second. There is even a old Microsoft Article about this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138598

    I'm using the hardware that came with the computer. My question(s) are:

    Do I need the Intel Storage Matrix Manager thing? The computer seems fine without it, but will the manager make my hard drive more reliable or perform even better?

    If the Intel Storage Matrix Manager is important, did anyone find an easy way to make the HDD light stop blinking every second without doing something drastic like disabling the DVD/CD drive? (this actually does work)
     
    gpig, Apr 1, 2010
    #1
  2. Commander Wolf

    Commander Wolf can i haz broadwell?

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    I've found that under XP switching SATA operation to AHCI and loading the Intel drivers can add a couple extra MB/s to drive performance in a couple corner cases (ie with the sequential speeds of an SSD pushing the SATA bus limits). Whether this is due to AHCI operation or the Intel drivers, I am not 100% sure.

    Either way there are no practical gains in performance or reliability, and probably even more so since 7 has its own AHCI driver. The lack of noticeable performance gains has been documented since the days of 965 chipsets and I don't think it's changed since then...
     
    Commander Wolf, Apr 1, 2010
    #2