New Build HDD Problem

supra21 · 29 Dec 2007 at 17:01

I have a WD Caviar SE16 320GB SATA-II HDD and a Asus P5e Mobo with Vista Ultimate and 4Gb of RAM. The problem is the HDD activity LED it stays solid and flashes constantly even when i am not doing anything on my PC, its not just the LED; from time to time i can hear my HDD processing somthing even when i am doing nothing :confused:

Ive tried the following:

- looked in the task manager for any programs using the cpu nothing, colsed all programs to be sure and the HDD LED is still flashing.

- disconnected my SATA DVD drive, still no change

- defragmenting the HDD, still no difference

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

rpstewart · 29 Dec 2007 at 17:06

Vista will spend time after each boot filling the Superfetch cache with frequently used programs and files. The indexing service will also be scanning the disk creating the search index.

The former is worth leaving on and will settle down a few minutes after bootup, the latter is (in my opinion) a waste of time and can be disabled - it's in the services list as "Windows Search Service" or it can be disabled on a particular drive from the properties page in My Computer.

supra21 · 29 Dec 2007 at 17:15

sadly it did not work, any other ideas?

rpstewart · 29 Dec 2007 at 17:19

Performance tab of Task Manager - hit the Resource Monitor button and look in the Disk section, if you sort the read and write columns you'll be able to see what's reading from /writing to the disk.

supra21 · 29 Dec 2007 at 17:29

ok well thats werid after watching the performance monitor for a while the hdd led is not constantly solid anymore but still flashes a litte every few seconds. However i can see that it is constantly writing log files, NTFS volume log?

EDIT, after looking at the performance moniter the problem seems to be solved, still flashs a bit but i cannot hear the HDD anymore which makes the system much quiter, thanks rpstewart!