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.

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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. .

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  1. Anonymous
    2011-05-17T15:16:16+00:00

    Looks to be a common problem with Dells..

    http://notebooks.bigresource.com/Dell-constantly-blinking-HDD-LED-on-E5500-5qXD9thk.html#0verHVDQ

    Aside from that, virus scanners can have the same effect if they are scheduled to do a full scan too often. Some take so long to complete one full scan, and if the scan frequency is set too often, they never ever stop scanning. Take a look at your settings for this.

    Indexing usually stops after a few days, unless you are in the habit of moving stuff around frequently, in which case, indexing might never stop.

    If the computer is slow getting to Windows login, suspect a failing drive (regardless of how new it may be).

    Have you moved your pagefile to another partition on the same drive as the boot partition? If you have, move it back to C. Only ever move the page file to another physical drive if you are going to move it at all.

    Scheduled 'full' backups will see the HDD light constantly blink and  as per virus scans, may only just finish before the process is started again.

    Is it a general Windows 7 issue? Not on my computer, it isn't..

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  2. Anonymous
    2011-05-17T13:23:20+00:00

    If it blinks about once per second, this is what is called a "heartbeat" and is common with a number of computers.

    J W Stuart: http://www.pagestart.com

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-05-17T06:54:28+00:00

    When the computer is not being used the system carries out routine tasks like defragmenting, indexing etc. Don't worry about it.

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  4. Anonymous
    2011-05-17T02:28:38+00:00

    Dear Hershey444

    I've just put together an i7 box with Windows 7 HP64 and I have the blinking HDD light.

    No applications load at startup. Brand new, therefore clean system.

    Did you ever get an answer to your Dell problem?

    Erik

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