HDD Activity Light pulsates

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have just completed a new system build.  Everything seems to be working fine, but the LED HDD activity light constantly pulsates at about the rate of 1x/sec.  Is this normal? What is it doing?



OS: Win7 Professional 64-bit

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R

HDD:  WD 1001FALS  1TB Caviar Black

Case: Coolermaster HAF922

GPU: XFX Radeon HD 5850

PSU: Corsair TX850

RAM: Corsair 6GB (3x2) 1600 PCA 12800

2

It might be due to a hard drive indexing service. You can turn it off to see if the issue is gone.

3

Thanks for the reply. How do I turn it off?  And what advantage/disadvantage does that indexing provide if I have it on/off?

4

Indexing Service maintains a database of your files and updates them without your intervention, thus making your HDD LED twinkle. The service is used to speed up a search for files on the hard drive, so if you don’t use Windows Search often, it’s recommended to turn this feature off, as it uses a noticeable amount of the computer’s resources.

You can uninstall it by going to:

Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off > (untick) “Indexing Service”

5

Turns out the indexing service was not checked/enabled.  Any other ideas?

6

Additionally go to properties of your local disk(s) drive and untick “Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to files properties”.

Also go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services > Windows Search > Properties and stop and disable the service.

7

Depending on your OS, you may need to turn of Autoinsert Notification, AutoRun, or AutoPlay.

I suspect that the OS is polling your optical drives on a regular basis to check whether a disc has been inserted.

8

Thanks for the help, gentlemen, but I’ve taken all your suggestions, and still no dice. ???  The only reason I’m concerned is that if in fact this pulsating LED indicator is correctly showing HDD activity, I’m wondering if it will take its toll on the drive and diminish its longevity as time goes on.

9

Thanks for the help, gentlemen, but I’ve taken all your suggestions, and still no dice. ???  The only reason I’m concerned is that if in fact this pulsating LED indicator is correctly showing HDD activity, I’m wondering if it will take its toll on the drive and diminish its longevity as time goes on.

10

Did you check task manager for any activity (try Process Explorer also) ? Do you have SearchIndexer.exe running (Show processes from all users) ? Any backup software ? Disable all of you start up applications, to see it’s not one of them. Disable System Restore. Try defragmenting the drive and a virus scan also.

Every drive has it’s time, and although it should be working fine under most of the circumstances, I don’t think constant activity is normal.