HDD led blinking while idle

On my Q310 the HDD led flashes constantly on a steady rhythm, about once per second, even when there is no activity. The HDD also creaks once in 4-10 seconds and produces another head noise pattern that I included in attachment from time to time randomly.

I have uninstalled antivirus, disabled indexing service, cd-autodetection - still the same.

It shows the same symptoms both under Windows 7 and XP installed on different partitions. It's still there even when I boot from Win Live CD or even when Windows setup or restore is running. Safe mode - the same.

Whereas DOS sessions are free from it.

So I have come to a conclusion that it's not a certain service or program, it's rather a low level driver issue or something.

Anyone experienced something like this, maybe, on a different model?

PS

I also blaimed it on Advanced Acoustic Management settings I tweaked to min noise a while ago, but I restored it back to maximum performance - no change.

Or could this be because I deleted Samsung Recovery partition and merged it with C drive?

 

It is probably either some indexing going on or some software writing to a log file.

You might be able to detect the culprit by searching for files that are not older than, say, 2 minutes.

John

 

In Vista could be due to automatic backup and also automatic defrag, both enabled by default. In Safe Mode does it too?

 

I figured out that 1hz led blinking has to do with polling the CD-ROM on ATA bus for auto insert notification .

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=304528&page=40

Disabling auto-insert in Windows was of no help for me, but physically removing the drive or disabling it in Device Manager stopped that blinking completely.

The every 5-10 second creaking problem still persists.

It's not a service or a program. I have it even when Windows setup is idle waiting for me to click something. There are no services or programs running, it is just the system's core and the very basic set of drivers.

Downloaded Ubuntu iso, it is able to boot without install - nothing like that. Acronis boot shell is also free from it.

So I guess that it's related to Windows family core or drivers.

I'm just curious whether anyone of Q310 users has noticed that or am I the only one?

 

Is the Intel Matrix Storage Manager part of the software installation?

If so, try using the latest version from Intel.

John

 

I've found the answer. What I'm talking about is HDD head parking noise. There are many notebook HDDs these days that have aggressive APM settings enabled which results in periodic clicking noise around every 5 sec.

More about it:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=191167

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking

The workaround I've found is to disable APM with HDDScan utility. It does not remove the parking clicks completely but reduces them to an acceptale level. At least, when Windows finishes all its background activity and clicks few times before going idle, after that there are no clicks for hours.

The disadvantage is that the drive does not remember the settings and APM is still enabled after reboot.