Hard Drive activity light constantly blinking - new WIN7 Ultimate Dell PC

Anonymous
2009-12-05T23:05:42+00:00

I've been troubleshooting this problem off and on for weeks on my brand new WIN-7 64 Ultimate Dell XPS 8000 (I7-860 1TB HD 8GB Ram).    Searching around has found many recommendations and a couple of resolved issues, (more non-resolved), but none of the recommendations has helped me.  

I got a feeling that this may be a Dell-specific issue, but I got no response in the Dell forums.   I'm sure if I call Dell support, all I will get is recommendation to put it back to factory default.  no thanks! 

I have disabled all the suspects, at least temporarily to see if it has an affect:

Windows Indexing & Search

Windows Firewall

Windows Defender

System Restore

Remote Differential Compression

Windows Fax & Scan

Superfetch

Seaport

With all these off, the blinking was clearly less busy, but there was still a steady heartbeat type of blink.   I since re-enabled Defender and System Restore.    (Even if they were to blame, that is hardly an acceptable solution/workaround!!!)

I've studied disk activity in PERFMON and there is some occasional kernel activity and event logging.  I took a couple of window snapshots I can post (if I can figure how).   I also created HijackThis log.  

Sometimes the disk activity PERFMON window is blank but yet the light continues to blink!!!  huh???

I have not disabled hibernate (there was a suggestion somewhere it could be involved).  I use it regularly.   But I can try that too you think it might help.

I am at my wits end and a little overwhelmed at all the data to study and search for.  I hate diddling with services and the registry, fearful of getting in over my head and creating a mess I can't get out of.  

Also, there is no additional security software and I did not install any preinstalled trial crapola.

Help!!!!!!!!

I will post the hijack this log in the next post

  Update to clarify:  What I reported above is basically about out-of-the-box behavior... not application or CPU-bound related. The system was pretty clean with minimal extra software/hardware installed.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Windows update

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
Anonymous
2012-09-23T00:01:56+00:00

Hard drive light blinks quckly because Microsoft does what is called something like  Write Cache Flushing ... flushes disk drive writes that might be in that cache to disk?  Simple.

The reason is .. if you have a power failure.. you will lose some data from that cache and/or corrupt something that may be important.   Takes a hit on drive performance and life expectancy too.  So some of the experts say.

If you have a battery backup.. or most laptops with a battery can.. Disable it!

.. In device manager the hard drive properties usually has a check box for enable write caching ..  and some will have another check box...  Disable Microsoft Write Cache Flushing.    <  add a check to that guys box...now look at your non very often blinking Hdd light... works  same with some of the DVD/CD drives, same controllers probably. .

Was this answer helpful?

10+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

46 additional answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2010-08-29T21:02:51+00:00

    This isn't a manufacturer-specific problem. I have a custom system and it happens. Everything on the SATA connections is being a problem, not just the hard drive. I've looked in my resource monitor and found that svchost.exe and "System" are taking most of the time reading or writing at 2 MB/s sustained. You can't do much about these because svchost is where all of the services plug into Windows, and System is the kernel and OS itself.

    I've looked through and removed many extra items in msconfig, but it is still as bad, and if I'm correct, has gotten worse over the last 2 days. There is something that happens whenever I try to burn a disk, or open up some program that involves an optic drive, that slows everything considerably.

    Samsung F2 5400 rpm 1TB Drive

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2010-02-25T20:50:09+00:00

    I am having this problem as well! When I open resource monitor, it says that system is writing to my disk at really fast rates, and my light stays solid and it slows everything down.

    This is the second PC that does this with Windows 7 so far, one of my laptops didn't have this problem though.

    This is a brand new PC!

    Edit: I think I may have found a potential answer!

    This started when I downloaded a large game file (legally,) microsoft security essentials thought it was a virus, but it did not give me any message at all.

    I believe that it could be your virus scanner and another file conflict. I opened Resource Monitor and checked what was hogging my HD activity and it told me that file was it. So I deleted it, and now all is well so far... Hope that helps!

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2010-01-22T21:03:39+00:00

    The Startup Mode of this service is set to Manual by default and the service only kicks in when you perform a Complete PC Backup. Thereafter it automatically terminates once you exit the Complete PC Backup screen. Change the service to Manual as it seems to have been changed.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2010-01-22T16:18:22+00:00

    I have this same problem on a new Dell T1500.  I have four other assorted Dell's that are fine.  For me the computer is not usable when the HD is being accessed.  So far I have not found a solution.  Disabling Superfetch didn't do it nor did stopping the indexing service.  I am getting ready to reinstall Window 7 and hope.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments