MrRadio

Believe me when I say I have exhausted every test I know to find out why I am seeing what I am seeing and mind you with my limited knowledge it may be that it is a normal occurrence, I don't know, but I have not seen it before the last week or so.

I am seeing the HDD access LED flashing continuously about once a second when for all intents and purposes the computer is idle. I have scanned for viruses, removed and reinstalled anti virus software and rescanned, examined running processes, examined net (no network activity detected) and network connections including isolating the computer from the network and so far no good reason for it.

Drive is a Samsung SATA HD403LJ 400GB (system drive) on a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 main.

Watching it like the Chinese water torture, can someone please put me out of my misery .. is this normal.

machine

Hi MrRadio,

If using Vista OS, it could be Vista indexing files.

MrRadio

Nah Machine ,XP SP3

PhillTheQuad

1. its a samsumg(buy a seagate next time)
2. pull the hdd_led wire off the mobo.
1 or 2 will solve your problem

__________________
vote for Luke fundraiser
http://mydreamis.ingdirect.com.au/?id=3635

ssrattus

Xp indexes too... right click on the drive properties ( in widows explorer etc) and see if indexing is checked.

myf360f1

Is that a bad think Ssratus ?

intelliGEORGE

Not really a bad thing, but if you want your PC to run faster, then turn off Indexing. It's one of many things you can do to tweak your PC to run faster.

intelliGEORGE

Disable Indexing Services

Indexing Services is a small little program that uses large amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexes and updates lists of all the files that are on your computer. It does this so that when you do a search for something on your computer, it will search faster by scanning the index lists. If you don’t search your computer often, or even if you do search often, this system service is completely unnecessary. To disable do the following:

Go to Start
Click Control Panel
Double-click Add/Remove Programs
Click the Add/Remove Window Components
Uncheck the Indexing services
Click Next

MrRadio

Indexing service was NOT checked so not the cause:

EDIT: let me clarify that, was checked in disc properties but not in add/remove.
Now both unchecked and heartbeat continues as before

ssrattus

Approaching this from a different angle, you could modify the Power settings so that the HD drive is powered down after say 5 minutes and see what that does. Right click the desktop --> Properties, screen saver tab --> Power... and select turn off hard drives after 5 minutes.

intelliGEORGE

Do you have any other SATA drives? Optical perhaps?

Do you have any removable media drives?

MrRadio

SS
will try power settings, interested to see what will happen

iGeorge
sata dvd

No removable drives attached

intelliGEORGE

Only reason I ask is, it is probably because what you think is a HDD activity, is the LED actually signalling common SATA/IDE channel activity.

If you have a SATA optical drive, then it is constantly polling (usually 1 to 2 flashes per second) the drive for media changes. For whatever reason the EIDE devices don't do this but the SATA ones do. As far as I know there is no way to disable this other than disconnecting the LED cable to the motherboard and not getting any drive feedback.

Also,

Both Vista an XP have a feature that defrags the HDD when your PC is idle, which is why you are probably seeing the HDD flashing. Can be disabled with the TweakUI Power Toy.

ssrattus

Get filemon and see what is using your HD

File and Disk Utilities: Sysinternals Center, Microsoft TechNet

intelliGEORGE

Disconnect the Optical SATA drive for testing purposes and you will find that will be the problem, as stated in my previous post, for some reason the SATA opticals are polled.

MrRadio

Stopped the DVD drive with Safely Remove Hardware ... bingo regular flashing changed to an occasional flash at very long irregular intervals. Thanks guys Now I can sleep tonight.
Go to the top of the class iGEORGE

therufus

The other thing you could have tried is loading a linux live CD like Ubuntu and see if it was doing it there. If it is, it's likely to be a hardware/bios issue. If not Windows.

A live CD is one of the best tools in a technician's arsenal.

z80

a lot of drives do a "patrol seek"

This extends the life of the drive by shaking the heads every so often.

I know the Fujitsu and some mitsubishi drives have done it for years.


just a thought.

and to add to the confusuion....System having table storing plurality of optimal patrol seek schemes for respective disk drives and executing associated scheme based upon inputted disk device name - US Patent 5615368

of course you may have a faulty hard drive that's allocating alternate sectors as it finds them...

patrol for improved system reliability : FUJITSU

therufus

Two of the most unreliable brands of hard drives ever built.

The irony is burning my eyes!