HDD light keeps blinking

Roland9 said:

I guess it doesn't do any real harm, but just thinking how my PC has no hdd light activity at all when it's idle, I got a little uneasy seeing the non stop blink.

I find it very disconcerting myself, because the LED catches my attention "what the heck is the HDD doing NOW!?". And it would REALLY drive me wild if I had an SSD, where HDD activity means wear/tear.

If you can ignore it, that's best because your HDD is not working nearly as hard as the LED would suggest, but if you can't ignore it, and you seldom use your DVD drive in that laptop, there's a nifty tool called devcon.exe with which you can make a couple shortcuts to easily disable/enable the DVD drive.

Oh, I forgot. You said:

>So if I don't disable it, the hdd will actually spin at a heartbeat rate? Doesn't that shorten the hdd's lifetime?

Not sure what you mean by "heartbeat rate", but so long as your laptop is on, and unless you're away from it and the HDD is spun-down, your HDD spins all the time, yes. Not a problem--just remember the "heartbeat rate" of the LED means nothing wrt your hard drive.

Britton30 said:

Hi Roland, you are right, XP and Windows 7 bear little resemblance under the hood. 7 has several things running in the background to help the users experience easier and more enjoyable. I suggest re-enabling Window's Defrag though. At default it runs automatically once a week on Wednesdays. You can change it to run when you like. It also arranges files as Windows 7 "likes" them, other defraggers don't.

Hi. I usually do the defrags myself once a month at least, but I guess I can turn it on... W7 seems very capable in maintenance (more than XP anyway).

maxseven said:

...there's a nifty tool called devcon.exe with which you can make a couple shortcuts to easily disable/enable the DVD drive...

Not sure what you mean by "heartbeat rate", but so long as your laptop is on, and unless you're away from it and the HDD is spun-down, your HDD spins all the time, yes. Not a problem--just remember the "heartbeat rate" of the LED means nothing wrt your hard drive.

What I meant was HDD being busy at a "steady rate"...when it's not supposed to be.

I'll look around for this devcon.exe.

Again, thank you all. :)

ctrl+shift+esc takes you to task manager
then
Performance > Resource monitor
takes you to the resource monitor and you can see exactly what's accessing your HDDs.

mjf said:

ctrl+shift+esc takes you to task manager
then
Performance > Resource monitor
takes you to the resource monitor and you can see exactly what's accessing your HDDs.

You missed the punchline--nothing is accessing his HDD.

maxseven said:

mjf said:

ctrl+shift+esc takes you to task manager
then
Performance > Resource monitor
takes you to the resource monitor and you can see exactly what's accessing your HDDs.

You missed the punchline--nothing is accessing his HDD.

Not really.
If the OP is worried about excessive HDD activity & what is causing it then the standard measures I gave will answer the question.
If the OP is worried about the blinking light then you have given him an answer.

The OP was worried that the regularly-blinking LED meant HDD activity. It does not.

If anyone knows how to get Windows to stop polling the DVD drive, other than as I've said disabling the driver, I for one would like to know how. And no, it's not as simple as turning off any/all autorun features.

I've done extensive research on this "heartbeat LED" problem, and apparently it doesn't plague everybody, although it does it on every one of my 5 or 6 PCs, all flavors of W7 and XP. It might, as someone mentioned earlier, be a "strictly SATA" thing but it seems to me it even does it on an old PC I have w/no SATA capability.

Better late than never !

I faced the same annoying problem last week on my Sony Vaio and here's how I solved it last night:

I installed a fresh copy of windows after which the HDD light wasn't flashing every second. Then I installed drivers and windows updates one by one and monitored the effect of each update and / driver on the HDD light. After installing DISK drivers the problem came back. SONY/Microsoft must fix their SATA and DVD drivers.

Solution for you:
No need to reinstall windows, just turn off your DVD drive when you don't need it and the flashig light will stop.

Even though its old stuff here.... I just couldn't keep my mouth closed...
Hdd blinks because.... you didn't read the instructions from Microsoft.

If you have a battery back up.. then it you might be able to disable 'Microsoft Write Cache Flushing' in Device Manager on your drives. Try it - Look at your hard drive light.