L502X HDD Light Constantly Active

Does anybody know why my Disk Activity light is always blinking? I checked Resource Monitor, and under the "Disk" tab, it looks like the "System" process is the one that is constantly writing to the disk, even when the computer has been idle for a while.

I'm getting an OCZ Vertex 3 soon, and I don't think constant writing to the disk will be a good thing.

Other than that, I don't have any fan, USB, or any other issues that others have been writing about.

 

could be a whole host of things... have you checked indexing is off? and it could be system restore. I wouldn't worry too much about it at the moment. But I suppose if your system is constantly writing to a SSD then maybe that could be a problem in the future? maybe someone can comment on this?

I tell you what though, I'm glad they put the HDD LED ('ol blinky) out of sight. It would do my head in if I could see it flickering away all day

 

Be careful, sandforce drives and laptops dont always get along. Some of the power management stuff can screw em up.

Anyhow, you have 8gb of ram so turn virtual memory off. Disable superfetch. Turn off indexing. Turn off browser caching. You wont feel a bit of difference with em off but it will live longer. I've managed to get my writes down pretty low. Also don't forget the crucial drives. Comparable to the 3s in performance but much cheaper.
I'm still a bit mad at OCZ. The write speeds on my Vertex 2 blows. I RMAd it for a "faster" 32GB IC version but the writes of uncompressed data still blows. ~60MBs.

 

Thanks for the replies. I have indexing off (since the XP days), changed virtual memory to 0MB, and I'll disable System Restore, but how do I turn off browser caching and Superfetch? Does that have anything to do with Write Caching? (which I just turned off, just in case.)
I've been through the OCZ forums as well, and I'm hoping for the best!
I'll do a clean install onto the Vertex 3, instead of the clone that at one time I thought would be a good idea. After reading the OCZ forums, I learned that a clone won't get the alignment right.

 

Windows 7 automatically disables Superfetch, among other things, when using an SSD.

 

Cool. I looked into the Resource Monitor some more, and it looks like the "C:\$LogFile (NTFS Volume Log" is the main culprit, with "C:\$Mft (NTFS Master File Table" running a distant second. This is after I disabled every startup service in MSConfig.

 

A clone can get the right alignment depending on the cloning software you use. I used Macriam Reflect. Its free. The caveat is you need to first hook the SSD up as a slave on some system and make the partitions first. I just plugged it in to a windows 7 system, went to drive management, made partitions to reflect the ones I was going to copy. Then you backup your current drive and choose to restore backup to that drive. Pick the partition you want to restore in the backup, pick the corresponding partition on the new drive. It can be bigger, just not smaller, and they need to go in the same order. IE restore, then windows. After you restore all of the partitions to the ones youve made you are good to go and the drive should be bootable. As long as you don't destroy and create new partitions you keep alignment.

 

Problem solved, but...it took replacing the stock HDD with the Vertex 3 and a clean install of Win7. Now the light doesn't blink all the time. I never could find out what was causing it with the HDD.

 

I have exactly the same problem. I look in the resource monitor and i found the same files writing constantly to disk. The light is always active and the disk is making constant noise. i disabled superfetch, turn off indexation and virtual memory at 0 MB. I installed Linux and the light doesn't blink constantly so it is a Windows 7 issue. Did anyone with the problem found a solution? I don't want to go as far as to reinstall Windows 7.

 

FWIW, this site has a detailed breakdown of how and what to disable in regards to SSD optimization in Windows 7...
The SSD Optimization Guide - The SSD Review

 

Thanks for the link, Lurker. Some good tips in there.