Why does my Hard Drive Activity Light Constantly Blink

[ajamminman]

Hi,

I upgraded my HP Pavilion a1540n Desktop to Windows 7 a week ago. Ever since, my hard drive light constantly blinks. After looking at the disk activity in the Windows Resource Monitor and doing some research I am leaning towards the page file as the problem. I am not sure if that is in fact the problem as there seems to be quite a few processes creating high disk activity, including Firefox profile cache, $Logfile, and MpWppTracing.bin. I only have 1GB of RAM. Would I be better served to add RAM before doing anything else like using Cacheman?

 

[Lordbob75]

Do you actually have constant hard drive activity, or is the light just blinking?

~Lordbob

 

[ajamminman]

I actually have activity.

 

[Qdos]

It'll be the page file majorly, or perhaps Windows7 is still indexing archives.

More RAM will certainly reduce page file calls, however it won't stop this altogether unless you fit enough RAM to safely turn off physical paging.

Not tried turning off paging in W7, however it used to be quite safe in XP when you had 4Gb or more of physical memory.

 

[computersplus]

A Couple Of Things

A couple of things I would do first I would make sure you have only the bare minimum applications that start up with Windows

Also after doing an upgrade like that get a good defrag utility like PerfectDisk and do a complete defrag and by complete I mean the locked system files most free defrag applications do not have the ability to do this but you can download a trial of PerfectDisk or O&O Defrag something like that this should help greatly.

 

[DBsantos77]

Sorry if it's been asked already but, is it a blinking light every second? Or is it turned on without turning off?

 

[ajamminman]

I will order 4GB of RAM tonight. I was trying not to spend that $150. I wouldn't mind so much but the disk activity seems to be causing recorded audio to skip. I do a lot of digitizing of cassettes and albums using Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio but I am unable to any since the upgrade.

 

[DocBrown]

Are you using 32 bit win7 or 64 bit win7 ?

 

[ajamminman]

I am using the 32bit version and the blinking is steady about every second.

 

[computersplus]

File System Mess

I'm telling you your drive is working overtime trying to index all those scattered files do a good defrag and it will help reduce that disk activity.

 

[computersplus]

Indexing

matter of fact you can turn off indexing itself and that will help a lot

 

[ajamminman]

You wouldn't think a newly installed OS would be fragmented. I'll give that a try.

 

[computersplus]

Upgraded

you said you upgraded and if the Vista was not defragged before the upgrade now it's a mess in there yes always defrag after

 

[ajamminman]

Interesting. I actually upgraded from XP to Windows 7 and did a clean install.

 

[Jonathan_King]

It may be true that Windows is indexing. How about leaving it on overnight, and posting back tomorrow morning if it is still blinking.

 

[Jambe]

I have the same problem on several computers, and some computers that don't have the problem. There are thousands of users who have this problem (ask Google) and no one has been able to provide a valid answer.

It is not indexing, it is not internet, it is not "how Windows is supposed to work", it is not USB, it is not DVD drive. It is not likely HDD as it occurs with both WD and Seagate drives. I haven't ruled out BIOS as all my computers use Award. Black tape over the light is not a valid answer.

I am trying to get around to asking Fred Langa if he has any idea what causes this blinking.

 

[computersplus]

Blinking

A certain amount of blinking is not abnormal there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes so to speak but heavy constant hard drive use can be an issue.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Are your SATA and HD drivers up-to-date?

 

[smarteyeball]

If you want to know what it is doing, just use the resource monitor / disk activity (type: Resource in the start menu)

View attachment 44493

 

[ajamminman]

If you want to know what it is doing, just use the resource monitor / disk activity (type: Resource in the start menu)

View attachment 44493

I have used the Resource Monitor but I can not determine what activity is abnormal. Page File and a couple of other processes are the highest (I mention them in my first post) but how do you determine if they are using the disk more than they should?