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Any XP users switching to Windows 7 yet?
MilesAhead:
Just curious. Is it a multi-core PC? I'm wondering if 7 does a better job of distributing processes among the cores at startup?
-MilesAhead (November 30, 2009, 01:28 PM)
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Well... Dual Core ;D
I've noticed the disk activity light flashing fairly frequently as well since moving to Win7 but there's not audible disk thrashing going on and performance doesn't appear to be affected so I'm not sweating it.
-Darwin (November 30, 2009, 02:16 PM)
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I think it must be some interaction with drivers or something. When I was searching I noticed a lot of people saying XP SP1 didn't give the blink but XP SP2 did. It seemed like the consensus was disabling auto-insert notification sometimes fixed it. When I had Vista 32 bit on the machine I was getting so much disk activity and it took so long to tame it that I don't remember if I got the regular pulse with Vista or not. I was definitely getting performance killing drive hogging. But I think the pulsing is just some controller polling issue. CrystalDisk benchmark is giving good numbers. I'm not worried about the LED wearing out before the machine dies. :)
Innuendo:
For those of you experiencing the HD LED flashing thing....what might be going on is that Windows 7 will defrag your hard drives while idle if Windows deems it's needed. You can turn this behavior off in the Defrag app if you desire.
MilesAhead:
For those of you experiencing the HD LED flashing thing....what might be going on is that Windows 7 will defrag your hard drives while idle if Windows deems it's needed. You can turn this behavior off in the Defrag app if you desire.
-Innuendo (November 30, 2009, 10:20 PM)
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If it was defrag it would run on. I'm talking about a ticking like a clock every one or two seconds. The LED just lights, then goes out. It doesn't stay on like when the HD is being accessed steadily such as during defrag. I'm pretty certain it's polling the hardware. It may stop and start depending on the OS and service pack. Must be some driver interaction. I went through all this with Vista before SP1. Believe me, it's not defrag.
f0dder:
Simply "polling" a harddrive (which I can't imagine being done) shouldn't cause the LED to light - only if you're reading or writing the drive... but that can happen for a lot of reasons. I don't see that happening on my install, but I've stripped off windows search/indexing and defragger.
What other software do you have running in the background?
Innuendo:
If it was defrag it would run on. I'm talking about a ticking like a clock every one or two seconds. The LED just lights, then goes out.-MilesAhead (December 01, 2009, 12:02 AM)
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Last time I saw something like that was when Windows 95 was out. A driver update and a new BIOS fixed it.
It doesn't stay on like when the HD is being accessed steadily such as during defrag.
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Defrag-when-idle doesn't just access your hard drive steadily. It'll defrag a couple seconds, stop a couple seconds to see if any other program needs to perform any operations, defrag again a couple seconds, etc.
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