Hard drive constantly flickering under Windows 7 on CW

I have a new i3 CW running Windows 7 Home. It is set so that the power button and lid send it to sleep mode. The power management is set to balanced. I removed the fluff software but still have the main Sony programs. I am not running an active anti-virus.

My issue is the hard drive is constantly being hit. The light blinks about once per second. This has to be robbing power and wearing on the HD.

Does anyone know what is causing this and how it can be stopped? If this is saving info for the sleep operation I would think it could happen far less often.

 

I have this same issue with the HD on my Sony Z. So, like most people I hibernate the laptop instead of letting it sleep. It's either a f'up in the way Windows 7 is written, or a f'up in the way Sony build their laptops. It's anyone's guess, but given the worldwide reported battery drain problems across many laptops running Windows 7, it's probably MS's F'up.

 

Is the power indicator amber or green?

 

Green isn't it? Whatever color when it is running - because it is. The HD light is amber about 2 spots over.

 

Oh, you're not saying you're trying to put it to sleep and it's doing this. You're saying it's awake and the HDD indicator is just blinking seemingly every second. There's nothing out of the ordinary with that, and it won't cause any HDD wear. Now battery wear wise, if the HDD is spinning, then the power draw when reading/writing to the HDD is negligible. If the HDD is reading/writing and the processor is above 15-20%, then that will affect battery life. Most laptop HDD's have a peak power usage of about 2.3-2.4 watts, put thats at absolute peak. Most average about .9-1.0 watts.

 

Possibly your Win 7 is set to constantly index the HD - maybe changing the indexing setting will help.

 

That's a very good suggestion. I always turn the Windows Search service off in services.msc. Also, while in services, you can also disable these if you have them and don't use them, but don't mess with too many others as Windows could get easily messed up that way...

Google Update Service
Media Center Extender Service
Routing and Remote Access
Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service
Windows Search

 

How to you disable this?

 

Press the Windows key+r and it will bring up a "Run" dialog box. Type in "services.msc" and it will bring up the services list. Close to the bottom of the list you'll see "Windows Search" double click it and click "Stop". Now in the drop down box, select "Disable", then apply, then ok. That will turn off all indexing on the drive.