HDD light flashes whe idle.

[mis33]

Just set up my P5E-WS with one single WD HDD and 2 DVD writers, all SATA.

I noticed that the front HDD light flashes (about every second) even the computer is idle. Is this normal?

 

[yay]

lol, my sister laptop used to do this, never did any damage. You might disable Last access timstamp, could stop the flashing, but it does increase performance. To do this, run regedit navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem] look for NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate and set it to 0. and your done.

 

[lcaley]

What OS?

 

[mis33]

WinXP Professional 32 bit.

What is Last Access Timestamp? Did you mean that it would increase performance if it is turned off?

Is this someting new with SATA? I don't recall the light flashes all the time with the IDE HDD in my old PC.

 

[rallyimprezive]

These days, computers are NEVER really idle.

Windows Xp has a minimum of 11 processes running in the background at all times. If you have antivirus, you'll have probably 15 processes.

Then add processes and services for your video card, sound card, mobo drivers, adobe download manager, any P2Ps you may have, and a few other update agents....

Before you know it, you have 50-60 processes running in the background, and your computer is never really idle.

And if that doesnt bug you, get Vista it NEVER stops "thinking."

 

[mis33]

It does not bug me but I just wanted to know if this was normal.

I have a HDD light in the front panel of my old PC and it did not used to flash continuously like this. I tried to understand if this is a SATA thing.

If the HDD is assessed continuously like this, the "last Access Timestamp" would be updated everytime. So, there will be a performance hit (at least theoretically) when this is enabled.

 

[zenmaster]

Grab "FileMon", I think you will be shocked at the constant disk activity on most systems.

 

[zenmaster]

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Filemon.mspx