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

Anonymous

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

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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46 additional answers

Anonymous

2009-12-09T15:27:39+00:00

Yeah things have changed since Win3.11

It's all in the .net - among other things.

Windows is like java now ... it stores ALOT of librarys ready to on demand.

RAM has gotten cheap, so now thier are huge copies of programs ready to be swapped into memory as quickly as possible on your swap.

---> it's actually the less you do on windows 7 the more your hardrive will start swapping ram, ngening and optimizing than when you are actually doing something.

----> start putting stuff on your harddrive -- photos movies music, software etc... believe me the algortihm will slow down - the less you have on your hardrive the more it sees oportunity to optimise, as it starts to fill up it sort of just "gives up" (ie it would tak it longer to defrag and it also won't see an advantage to it so it only does it on your command -- with excpetion the swap still gets defraged and optimised).

------> also -switch off your pc once in a blue moon (or switch optimization to background processes - that'll stop the hardrive)... even XP did some of the above although Vista and 7 do it alot better - it's actually trying to guess what you will start up the next time you start your computer.

------>another thing to do actually set a time in power management -- that will give it less of a "chance" to decide to optimize.

-------> another thing, the dellxps models are darn fast pc's - so win7 sees that with that much idle processing poewer it should do some defragging while your youtubing. On slower PC's (like mine) it don't really do it - now that much 1Tb is at 300gb it's stopped.

Computer nerd that services Grannies
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Anonymous

2009-12-09T14:57:21+00:00

mrsound, your post prompted me to google "NTFS Volume log" and the hits I got were very disconcerting! I encountered many threads complaining of this same problem with VIsta?!?!?!?! I thought Win 7 was supposed to be not have the Vista problems.

And why no MS response here? known problem?
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Anonymous

2009-12-06T02:57:05+00:00

Are you implying its normal for disk i-o to occur if no programs (apps) are running? Services might be listening for events, but they should not be doing disk-io all the time. IMO.

Its probably a problem if the disk is spinning 24x7 (or thereabouts) surely there will be premature hardware failure.

This is a sample of the Disk Activity being recorded while all the above services were disabled and all my apps were closed.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/uT9bzddBSaaPLHg2mqarxw?authkey=Gv1sRgCJC4xPjmuoDP8wE&feat=directlink

Its a little hard to read. may have to zoom.
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