P4C800 E Deluxe Raid/HDD Light ?????

[Keith & Brenda Norwick]

Hello,
Just got done setting up my mobo with 2 Maxtor SATA 160GB Drives on Intel
Raid Controller, however, after setting everything up, now the hard drive
light blinks about once a second?? I dont have anything up and going, so Im
not sure what its reading or writing to the drives, oh, and by the way I
have the two drives set as raid 0. I just have never seen disk activity
like this before for no reason. If anyone has seen this before, I would
really appreciate any feedback, thanks again in advance!!


Keith

P4C800E Deluxe V1016
P4 2.6 [email protected]
2 Maxtor 160 SATA Drives
1 Maxtor 60GB Utra ATA 133
Santa Cruse Sound Card
Asus Geforce 3
1GB Kingston DDR 433

 

[Michael S.]

Keith--I have two SATA Raptors in RAID 0 confiuration plus an IDE backup
drive using that same motherboard and the drive light only shows up when any
of the three drives are in operation. It is my understanding that LEDs are
polarized, so I wonder what happens if you reverse the lead from the LED to
the connector on the motherboard?

MikeSp

 

[Paul]

Keith--I have two SATA Raptors in RAID 0 confiuration plus an IDE backup
drive using that same motherboard and the drive light only shows up when any
of the three drives are in operation. It is my understanding that LEDs are
polarized, so I wonder what happens if you reverse the lead from the LED to
the connector on the motherboard?

MikeSp

No. If the LED is lighting, then it is connected correctly (i.e.
polarity is correct).

I suspect the OP has the OS installed on the disk, and we are
seeing some Win2K/WinXP file caching/swapping/futzing that a
modern OS likes to do. On my Win2K machine, I was annoyed to see
this kind of activity, and I tried all manner of hacks to stop it.
I never succeeded. (Since the machine had a lot of RAM, I even
tried putting swap on a RAM disk - a pretty absurd idea, and
even that didn't stop it, at least proving it probably wasn't
some kind of swapping or VM activity, but was related to file
caching. Files are cached in memory, and are "dribbled out" to
disk once a second. That is the best I could figure out on
my own. It used to happen a lot while downloading from the
internet.) Maybe it is some kind of indexing activity...

You might try using the RAID 0 as a data only array, and then
maybe the flashing will stop. Put the OS on another disk.

Just a guess (as my understanding of Win OSes is pretty poor).

Maybe someone who knows how it works can explain it
Paul

 

[Walt]

Doesn't XP, being basically paranoid, periodically check to see if
its hard drives are still there?

 

[Ken]

No. If the LED is lighting, then it is connected correctly
(i.e. polarity is correct).

I suspect the OP has the OS installed on the disk, and we are
seeing some Win2K/WinXP file caching/swapping/futzing that a
modern OS likes to do.

Probably indexing the drives.
Turn off the indexing service!
I always had to do this after installing OS.