Rhythmic blinking HDD light not caused by Autoplay?

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Doe
  • Start date Start date
J

John Doe

I thought the only cause for a perpetual rhythmic blinking HDD
light is Autoplay. But all of my Autoplay settings are "Take no
action". I would suspect System Monitor, but it's not
automatically started and it's not running.

It isn't necessarily once per second, but that's the average.
Sometimes it's just a flicker. Other times it's more obvious.

Thanks.
 
John said:
I thought the only cause for a perpetual rhythmic blinking HDD
light is Autoplay. But all of my Autoplay settings are "Take no
action". I would suspect System Monitor, but it's not
automatically started and it's not running.

It isn't necessarily once per second, but that's the average.
Sometimes it's just a flicker. Other times it's more obvious.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

What does Sysinternals Process Monitor say ?
Do a trace with filtering undefined, so you
can see everything.

The OS can do a fairly large number of (repetitive)
Registry reads per second. That shouldn't cause
the LED to flash. But perhaps if you see
specific I/O's going to some other storage
device, you'll get some idea where it's coming from.

Paul
 
I thought the only cause for a perpetual rhythmic blinking HDD
light is Autoplay. But all of my Autoplay settings are "Take no
action". I would suspect System Monitor, but it's not
automatically started and it's not running.

It isn't necessarily once per second, but that's the average.
Sometimes it's just a flicker. Other times it's more obvious.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
If you have an optical drive attached there will be flashing
(indicating access by the storage controller to a device) and
there is no known way of turning that off, other than
disabling the optical drive in device manager, then re-enabling
it when you want to use it.
Try it.
There have been lots of threads about this all over the web
over many years. It's not fixable by tweaking any windows settings,
services or registry values.
 
Wolf K said:
The OS "polls" attached devices at regular intervals, is all.
Nothing to worry about.
Click to expand...

In my case, after applying Process Monitor, the culprit appears to
be Dragon NaturallySpeaking. But I'm moving back to Windows 8, so
maybe it don't matter.
 
The OS "polls" attached devices at regular intervals, is all. Nothing to
worry about.
Click to expand...
Exactly. It's more of an annoyance than anything else, a bit
like the way the power LED flashes constantly when in sleep
mode on some motherboards. Not good in a bedroom, but easily
cured by non-IT means. :-)
 
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