Hard drive always being accessed

[JP5]

I have an IS7 motherboard and Western Digital 200GB IDE HDD. The hard drive seems to always be getting accessed and the HDD light always flickers lightly. It is not as bright as when it is accessing files during idle.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it possibly just feedback from the drive spinning?

The CPU use is at 0% and there are no programs running in the backdground. No viruses either. It's been doing it since the bare Windows XP install so I don't think it's any software.

I don't want this to lead to the early death of this drive...

 

[svol]

I got the same... I asume it is normal as nothing weird happened over years of seeing this on different drives.

I love my Delta 60HP 7000 RPM fan that puts out more dB then CFM

 

[blah]

XP does that.

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...

 

[JP5]

I've just never seen it on other computers I've built.

 

[svol]

Where that WinXP or Win2k systems or with Win9x installed? IIRC Win9x doesn't do it but it is normal for Win2k/XP.

I love my Delta 60HP 7000 RPM fan that puts out more dB then CFM

 

[tmlim]

Hopefully you're not running Windows ME. ME tends to do that with any hard drive.

 

[Crashman]

How much RAM do you have?

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[JP5]

I'm using WinXP. I have 512M RAM, but it reads with no programs running in the background, so I don't think it's the swap file.

 

[Crashman]

I'm fairly certain that XP ALWAYS puts some stuff on the swap file when you have 512MB or less RAM. I say this because, when I upgraded from 512MB to 1024MB, XP used MORE RAM. That would indicate the more RAM you use, the less XP uses the swap file.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[JP5]

I don't know about XP but Win95 and 98 used to just take a certain percentage of the RAM for the OS, like 40% or something. So if you had 128M, about 50M would be used or 100M with 256M. It may have been more like 1/3, it's been a while.

I just noticed in NT that the processes don't add up to the memory used. I guess the deficiant amount is in use by the OS.

 

[korins2]

Have you tried disabling drive indexing?

 

[JP5]

How do you do that?

 

[Karlsbad]

I have an 800 MHz P3 win2k pro that does this now. This idle activity has always gradually increased from none to constant every time I reformat. I think this time I did some registry editing that shortly afterward bumped it up quite a bit. I think it was deleting some creative bugware. I found an article on technet about it that said something about unformatted partitions lol, although of course I have no such partitions. Bottom line I think it's corrupted registries and or creative ware in my case, basically old windows installations.

Committed to excellence, willing to make do with high average, able to get by on mediocrity in a pinch.

 

[korins2]

In windows explorer, right click your harddrive(s) and at the bottom, uncheck "Allow indexing service..." This only applies if your partitions are NTFS.

 

[JP5]

Great, I'll give it a shot