HDD light flashes under Win XP for no apparent reason. What causes this?

[theplanb]

Out of no where, I get this HDD access/read whatever (I don't know what it is doing.. maybe it's looking for something I don't know).
I'm using Windows XP. It's like .. fastfind thingy that comes with Office suit except taht I don't have any office product installed on my computer. It does this no matter what kind of programs are running and it makes me craazzzy. I think it started after I set all the services into automatic (from manual).
What is it doing, and what causes this? and how do I make it stop? Please help..

 

[sohcrates]

it could be the computer using virtual memory (i.e. writing to hard disk)

how much memory do you have in that box?

 

[LiekOMG]

theplanb - is the HD access sorta like a small half second read that happens about once every 3 seconds? Because i've experienced the same thing. Not sure whats causing it, but it first noticed it when playing a game, and i thought there was some kinda memory leak. then one day i noticed it happen when it was just sitting idle in windows. Not sure what its doing, but i didn't notice it effect anything. Of course, if your computer is right in your face and your HD is loud, i suppose it can be annoying to constantly hear clicks every 3 seconds.

 

[theplanb]

It's pretty much random. I don't see any pattern in it.. it does thisabout 10 seconds.. then stopps. Then when I'm aboutto forget about it, it starts again. I have 256MB ram in the system..

 

[BD231]

I expierence this also, my flashes once every secound, like a clock waiting to be set, it makes no noise whatsoever though. I have a drive door so it dosent bother me, could something be rong with XP?

 

[bsobel]

Xp includes numerous background processes that 'cleanup' the system and do other maintence in the background. One is the indexing service which indexes the documents on your system for faster searching, another is the boot/load time management which rearranges (ala defrag) portions of the disk based on what apps your loading to minimize their load times. Even with no apps loaded the system is often doing these background tasks (which are generally set to run at a background priority, so if your actually using the system heavily they shouldn't interfere).

If you want to see exactly whats going on check out the tools as sysinternals.com. Filemon will show you what process is read/writing to the disk. I think you'll be suprised at the number of things that are reading/writing in an idle system.

Bill

 

[potz]

not only that, if you're using ntfs it uses the disk much more because it keeps logs of file updates and just about everything you do to the filesystem. that is normal for xp, 2k, and nt4.

 

[theplanb]

wow disk doesn't stop.. and I'm using FAT32..
How do i disable index service?
Is there any other things that I can safely disable?

 

[millsy]

Check out this article, very useful:

XP services

and try this cool utility: XP antispy