Blinking Hard Drive Activity Light?

[RKBA]

Anyone have any idea why the drive activity light on my primary hard drive(s) blinks periodically every few seconds? I have both the bios and windows set to shut down the hard drives after 15 minutes of non-use, and that works fine for the drives other than the main boot drive (C :). The main drive may or may not also be getting shutdown, but it's kind of hard to tell because by the time my monitor powers up and is able to display stuff on the screen the boot drive would have also had time to rev up to speed. I first noticed the blinking one day when I got home from work after leaving the computer on all day, and while I was sitting in my easy chair in the same room with the computer but before even touching it, I noticed the hard drive light blinking occasionally (not on the secondary or tertiary drives, just the light on the main "Promise" Raid0 array).

I've tried shutting down all programs on the computer except just the basic ones needed by windows, but it nevertheless always occurs with both Win98 and Win2000. Because of that, and because an older computer I have that runs Win98 does not exhibit the same symptom, I have a hunch it probably has something to do with my motherboard or Bios (ASUS A7V motherboard w/ACPI BIOS). I checked the "Knowledge Base" and FAQ's on the Asus site, but there was no mention of this phenomena (blinking hard drive activity light).

Has anyone else experienced this? It's not really a problem, It's just a curious phenomenon that I haven't noticed on any other computer, and I wonder about its cause and whether or not the drive is actually being kept spinning, or whether it's just some sort of "keep alive" electronics check that doesn't affect the spin up/down of the drives.

-- Ron

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Centerfire (http://home.pacbell.net/rsdotson/) ‘‘The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’’ -- Thomas Jefferson

[This message has been edited by RKBA (edited 10-16-2001).]

[diurnal]

your hard drive is constantly running, its called a swap file, when you are low on ram, the hard drive is used as ram, albeit slower than ram. Also the hard drive is anticipating your moves to speed the process up. Dont worry this is normal behavior, if its a older model then it does it alot, and if you dont have alot of ram it will do it too.

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Sledgehammer will save the day!

[RKBA]

diurnal,

That's a thought, though I doubt the swap file is being used much since it occurs when no user applications at all are running (only the minimal programs needed by windows itself), and even after I haven't touched the computer at all for several hours.

Nevertheless, I'll try disabling the swap file altogether and see if it makes a difference. I've done that before just to see what happens, and it didn't seem to make any difference with performance one way or another. My computer is about a year old (1.1GHz AMD Athlon) and has 768 MB of RAM, and the swap file is set to 1150 MB fixed size and resides on one of the ATA drives other than where the OS sits - ie; Both Win98 and Win2000 reside on my 80 GB Promise Raid0 array, but the swap file for both resides on a 30GB drive on an ATA channel (not part of the Raid0 array), and the activity light for that drive doesn't blink when the computer is not in use.

Thanks,

-- Ron

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Centerfire (http://home.pacbell.net/rsdotson/) ‘‘The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’’ -- Thomas Jefferson

[This message has been edited by RKBA (edited 10-16-2001).]

[diurnal]

What do you need all that ram for databases or something, i think thats entirely too much ram for one thing? Also i would not disable the swap file either. Go to run/msconfig/startup tab.
Tell if you have alot of programs listed there.

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Sledgehammer will save the day!

[RKBA]

Too much RAM??? http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/images/emoticons/laugh.gif There's no such thing as too fast of a computer, or too much RAM, or too much Hard Drive space! The reason I have so much RAM is because it's so cheap. I just recently added two 256MB sticks because they were only $30 each. I would have added more, but I've only got three RAM slots. http://www.ezboard.com/intl/aenglish/image/emoticons/eyes.gif

I'm quite aware of what programs are loaded during startup and as I said before, when testing the "blinking light" phenomenon I killed all of them except for the bare bones processes necessary for windows to function. Thanks anyway.

-- Ron

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Centerfire (http://home.pacbell.net/rsdotson/) ‘‘The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’’ -- Thomas Jefferson

[diurnal]

http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,914642,00.html
Try this link buddy, im not lying when i said there is too much ram. And yes there is such a thing of two fast of something. For one thing you must understand there is a many of bottlenecks in a cpu. For one thing a 266 Front side bus for a processer does not run at 266 it runs at 133. Thats one bottleneck , so why buy a 266 when your not even gonna run at those speeds. BUt you sound like you know this , i cant believe you havent heard of any of this. Also your video cards you buy boast about 256bit output and 128bit output, when cpu bottlenecks all of it because , the cpu only has 32 bit registers, and cannot handle 256bit flow of memory.

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Sledgehammer will save the day!

[Rick]

RKBA

I also have the blinking lite phenomenon on one of my systems.
I have been able to stop it on one work station.
By Removing all but the absolutely needed program from startup and those loaded by win,sys,ini.and directly from the register
Despite the warnings from MS and others I removed Task-Monitor from startup

It “Task monitor” is only needed if you have a lot of file fragmentation and use Defrag.

Aside from that I can’t be of much help to you

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To ERR is HUMAN
To REALLY screw things UP, YOU NEED a COMPUTER !

[Rick]

diurnal
your link is a little out dated or should I say the author has used an out dated system for the example .
Who is running a TX board?

You should also read the last paragraph especially the section that starts with UNLESS
I have 96 meg in my laptop. Why ? To reduce hard drive activity and waste Battery use.
BTW that is all my unit will handle.
In my desktops I have a minimum of 128

Also anyone who quotes the Microsoft Minimums for an example of to much ram is living in the stone age in regard to computers . Win9x Minimum cpu is a 386 isn’t it.

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To ERR is HUMAN
To REALLY screw things UP, YOU NEED a COMPUTER !

[mjc]

There is only one practical limit to RAM...what your motherboard can handle...diminishing returns IS NOT the same as too much. It just means the amount of boost in performance is less than stellar (1 to 5% as opposed to double digit)...Win9x may have a problem with more than 512MB in stock configuration, but if you turn off windows presets and configure things yourself then it will run fine...actually better than fine. Couple all that with cheap prices of RAM I don't see where it makes sense not to load up to the max... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif.



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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[diurnal]

Good point rick, but dont you think 700mb of ram is overdoing it alittle, unless your databasing or video editing?
I know you cant have enough hard drive space for sure though, 100GB hard drives, is very realistic, because i need that much now, and even more.

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Sledgehammer will save the day!

[evalroy]

Just a thought...

Do you have MS Office installed? During a typical install, it installs an applet called Fast Find. As I recall, it is a resource hog resulting in an increase in hard drive activity. It does not deliver much bang for its buck and IMHO should be removed. You will need to boot to safe mode to do this since it loads at startup.

Good luck,
ER http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif


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I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
- Richard Feynman

[Rick]

diurnal

Actually no 768+ meg is a good number .
If the mother board and software can handle it.

I only have 512 in this system at the moment (Same M/B as RKBA) because of a heat problem with the 3rd 256 meg dimm slot being to close to my heat sink.

One Photo I just loaded to check the file size and memory use. Size in memory 312,673,256
before I do any thing to it. Now if I edit it. My software will create backups of it . And allow undo’s for a preset number of edit items. ( all In memory)

At that rate of memory use 512 gets filled very fast.

100 gig drives are still to small also. I know as you do that drives fill up very fast
Even doing backups or saving to removable disks .
I have been using PD disks for years. While others were head over heals in love with those Little 100 meg zip disks the above file I loaded to check memory use won’t fit on one http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif

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To ERR is HUMAN
To REALLY screw things UP, YOU NEED a COMPUTER !

[Gallaeglagh]

Maybe it's spyware saying "I'm lost and I wanna go home".

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Your attempt to reach civilization by fashioning a crude raft will astound everyone else at the office. - The Onion