Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id

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,

[4evrnyt]

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.

I am having the same issue with Vista 64-bit but I've turned off indexing and superfetch and the hard drive is still running all the time when I'm not doing anything on the computer.

What is there to disable to get it to stop doing this?

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.

[4evrnyt]

3gb.

it usually starts when the computer is just sitting idle. Internet Explorer doesnt' seem to interrupt it but If I start a game it usually stops. If I go into sleep mode, the hard drive will continue to run almost immediately after waking it up. i also have turned off powerboost.

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.

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!

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?

[Logoschild]

RB, you seem to have given the best advice here, sir. I am having the same issue as described above--the drive light blinks about every second when nothing is apparently going on and no apps are visibly running (other than whatever background apps are running). This is occurring on a brand-new, virus-free Toshiba laptop with a P7350 Duo 2 processor with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM and Vista 64. Perfmon shows the activity and also shows a constant processor util of about 4%-7%. The used resources (memory) stat is about 30% (so, apparently, Vista is a major resource hog, I guess). The only thing that appears to be accessing the drive is the operating system, but I may be missing something because it's hard to look at all that in a glance and I haven't searched out every line to see exactly what it is. What say you for my situation?

P.S. I have also noticed that the mouse (touchpad) pointer appears to skip a beat every now and then and/or appear to freeze momentarily. I just plugged in an external mouse to see if it does the same with the mouse (to determine if the problem is with the touchpad or my comfortability with it rather than a system performance problem).


Thanks in advance,
Logos Child

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.

[jimojimo]

It is the CD or DVD ROM.

Try going to the Safely Remove hardware (even though it may not be a usb) and do Stop on the CD or DVD listed.

If you don't see it there and want to verify that this is indeed it, just disconnect the ribbon cable, reboot. You'll notice the blinking is gone.

I don't know exactly why--I think on some OS's and some DVD/CD units, the os constantly checks it--it might be as the DVD unit gets older--i've had this happen twice--always after about a year from when I got the dvd unit.
--Jim