Why does my "harddrive" light blink all the time?

[Magnumike7]

I was wondering if it is normal for my harddrive activity light to blink on and off continously even when I am not running any programs. Even when nothing is running and I am looking at my desktop, (no internet) my harddrive light on the front of my case blinks on and off indicating that the harddrive is turning. I would think that as long as nothing is running that the harddrive would not be turning but I may be wrong. Any comments?

 

[Davegod]

if your using win xp, check blackviper to turn off some services maybe, some of them can access hdd frequently.

 

[AnAndAustin]

😉 Another common reason is inadequate RAM (it makes you wonder what M$ do with it all). If you have the latest OS's you'll be looking at 512MB to help prevent the over usage of a swap file. Otherwise as pretty much said WinXP likes to play with the HD a lot doing various indexing, defragging and other 'glorious' things behind the scenes while it deems the PC is dormant.

 

[Alkali]

If the light is constant --- You (or your pc manufacturer) may have plugged in the little 2-pin connector into the wrong pins on your motherboard, just double check with the manual.

If it is on for a very short period, then off, then on again in a very short period like that, then a program is accessing your hard drive constantly, double check by fnding out what programs are running in the background. (In Win2k/XP, just hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to get the task manager.

 

[jasonsRX7]

Try disabling SMART in the bios. I first noticed this on my old K7S5A and disabling SMART stopped it. SMART is enabled on the intel board I'm using now, and it does the same thing.

 

[Magnumike7]

Great, thanks for the help guys...and thanks for the link Dave...Great Site!

 

[tjaisv]

this is rather unlikely, but a flickering hard drive light in the absence of any active applications or processes may also indicate somebody's gained backdoor trojan access to your computer and is fooling around on your hard drive... 🙁