Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id

[Guest]

I need some answers to a question, actually an answer or opinion. I have a
dual boot machine XP/Vista Home Prem. , This is a pretty fast machine with
plenty of horsepower to run Vista. Gigabyte Mobo, Athlon 64 X2 4400+ chip,
4gb OCZ 800mhz. RAM, plenty of cooling and I'm not overclocking the processor
or anything like that. During system IDLE the HD light is constantly flashing
and I can hear it reading the HD. I have a IDE 160GB primary HD cut in half
and each partition has plenty of extra space after all software was
installed. A secondary SATA 300mbs 320 GB drive for DATA. It did not do this
after I initially installed both systems and got them up and running using
Vistas boot manager with Vista as the default.
I just need to know where to start looking. I have had this problem before
but only when I did not have enough system resources on the HD or RAM when I
had a dual boot OS/2 / Windows 95 machine long ago. OS/2 was just too much
for it and it constantly read the HD, I assume reading and writing to the
sys.pagefile due to lack of enough memory.
Anyone know where to start looking with this much information? If you need
to know all of the software installed I can get that together with no problem.
Thanks In Advance for the help, Sid
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Dustin Harper]

The hard drive is working constantly because Vista is indexing the
drive. It should stop after a few days, depending on how many files you
have. It makes searches a lot faster. But, initially, you will notice a
lot of hard drive activity.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. I have been running Vista on the machine for a few
months. Would that still be what is happening?
I thought about turning indexing services off. So I did anhd it cut down
most of it. Now it is just a short flash about every 1 to 2 sec.
-Sid

 

[John Tuttle]

Thanks for the reply. I have been running Vista on the machine for a few
months. Would that still be what is happening?
I thought about turning indexing services off. So I did anhd it cut down
most of it. Now it is just a short flash about every 1 to 2 sec.
-Sid





- Show quoted text -

You might also try stopping the Superfetch service. Set it to manual
start instead of automatic.

 

[Justin]

Sid,
I have this same situation on a fresh install of XP Pro - no drivers or any
new software yet. I've haven't seen this on any of the workstations at work.
It looks like many people have this problem, by looking at other posts.
Did you find a way to stop the HDD writes?

Justin

 

[Wandering]

You don't stop it!

Vista is nearly always doing something. It is much easier to get used to it.
It is not particularly harmful, and mostly it is beneficial. It may be
managing a paging file, or it may be tracking program usage so that most
used programs will be loaded on the fastest part of the disk during defrag,
it may be defragging, or perhaps Windows Defender is running, or the upgrade
manager, or the reliability tracking indicator, or it may be making shadow
copies, or phoning home, or checking for updates, or checking for problem
solutions, or.... You get the idea! It may not even be Vista running, as
today nearly every program wants to check for updates.

Instead of stopping what you are doing to run all these utilities, Vista
runs them in the background with no intervention on your part and also
almost no impact on the processor, and you go on about your business with no
worries.

 

[Wandering]

On another point, you generally run a 64 bit version for improved
performance. Turning off prefetch is a sure way to slow down the system. If
you are performance oriented, enable it.

Have fun.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

How much memory do you have? If you have 2GB or less then I am not
surprised the hard drive runs constantly and it still will no matter what
you turn off. It is paging to virtual memory on the hard drive. The
solution is to add more memory so that the system does not have to keep
moving things back and forth.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Use the Performance and Reliability Monitor in Adminstrative Tools to get an
idea of what is going on with the drive activity. This gave me useful info
and a suggested course to take in a similar situation. I found out that the
system was spending excessive time writing to the page file and followed the
suggestion in the report.

 

[IkidUnot]

I've seen McAffee do this on my computer from time to time. Regardless
though, you can find out by using something to see what's using resources. A
good example: At Sysinternals.com you can get Process Explorer. It's a
great little utility to see what's going on. Try it, let us know...

 

[James Truelove]

I upgraded my Acer Aspire from 1Gig to 2 Gig when I purchased it and have
not had any low memory issues that I can detect. I guess it depends what
software you run and how memory intensive the software is. But it is amazing
how much memory you need considering my first 386 computer only had 1MB and
I thought upgrading to 2MB was cutting edge!

James

 

[rb]

Close all applications. Run Perfmon. Click on Disk. Click on disk
Write. If your system sits "idle" long enough you should eventually
see disk write drop off to nothing. If not, look to see what is causing
disk IO. Turning off Superfetch and indexing on your fixed disk
drive(s) kills lots of disk IO without effecting system performance.

The "hard drive light" can indicate more than just fixed disk activity.
If your case IO light keeps blinking about once a second after disk
write activity stops then there is no disk activity - the problem may be
the SATA/IDE chipset IO polling related to your CD/DVD drive. If this
is the case disconnect the SATA or IDE connection to your CD/DVD drive.
Does this reduce of eliminate "apparent" IO activity?

What is your motherboard brand/model and the SATA/IDE chipset(s) on the
motherboard?

 

[Curious]

If it is a brand new Vista system then it will take it about a week to
complete indexing the driver for rapid retrieval of data by Vista. The
indexing process only runs when other applications are not running which is
exactly the symptom you are reporting.

 

[Wandering]

Lots of stuff run in the background with Vista. It is not likely you will
ever get to a point that the disk light does not flash occasionally. It
indexes the drives, defrags the drives, relocates most used stuff to the
fastest part of the drive, it builds lists of most used apps, it checks for
updates, it phones home for validation, ..... The list is much longer. The
point is that it is NOT XP, and don't expect to make it act like XP.
Flashing drive lights are what Vista does.

Good luck.