Question

HDD LED flashes constantly - caused by SATA DVD RW drive

Asked by: acsell

Hello,

 I recently upgraded my PC (Mother Board, CPU, RAM) and also bought a SATA DVD RW drive.

When the drive is plugged in and windows is running (doesn't happen before windows starts), the hard drive LED will constantly flash every half second. When I remove the SATA drive, the flashing stops.

This tells me that windows must be checking the DVD drive every so often for some reason and this is activity is causing the flashing LED.

How would I stop this occurring? Is there anything I can disable in windows to stop it continually checking the DVD drive? It isn't doing any arm apart from annoying me!

This is the drive I have-
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/129527

and this is the motherboard-
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/113844

Thanks, Jonathan

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Asked On
2008-04-23 at 03:10:14ID23345910
Tags

Samsung

,

SATA DVD Rewriter

,

SH-S203D

,

DVD±RW/RAM/DL Serial ATA

Topics

Storage Technology

,

Digital Living Hardware

,

Hardware Components

Participating Experts
2
Points
250
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: nobusPosted on 2008-04-23 at 05:08:44ID: 21419681

does it do the same if connected to another sata port?

 

by: acsellPosted on 2008-04-23 at 05:46:40ID: 21420002

yes, I tried a different port the other day and there was no change.

I'm wondering whether it could be something to do with the way motherboard handles SATA optical drives. Maybe there is a setting in BIOS I could try changing?

thanks,
Jonathan

I knew I should have gone for an IDE one :-)

 

by: uartPosted on 2008-04-23 at 06:58:18ID: 21420714

Windows regularly queries the CD drives to see if a disc has been inserted (so that it can autorun if necessary). Usually when I've observed this it's about once a second or there about, so it sounds like your problem.

This alway happens but depending on the hardware the LED may not flash, or may be so brief that it can't be observed. The reason it happens is because querying the CD drive creates a transaction on the IDE (or SATA) bus and some controllers will indicate this activity (however brief) with a flash on the HDD led.

This HDD led flash does not cause any problems however some people do find it annoying. You can try disabling autorun with tweakui,
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx , that might stop it.

 

by: acsellPosted on 2008-04-23 at 11:22:42ID: 21423700

uart, thanks for your explanation - at least now I know that this is normal and not just my system.

Disabling autorun didn't have any affect.

I will leave this question open until tomorrow  in-case anyone else has a suggestion about how to stop it ( other than pulling out the HDD LED cable :-)  )

 

by: acsellPosted on 2008-04-23 at 13:01:13ID: 21424729

Although disabling auto-run for the Disk drives didn't fix it, disabling autorun for removable devices using tweakUI and then rebooting did  :-)

(my motherboard treats all SATA devices as removable devices)

Thanks for your help.
Jonathan

 

by: uartPosted on 2008-04-23 at 20:02:04ID: 21427481

Thanks for the extra info acsell.  It's been a long time since I'd seen that problem but I remembered that I fixed it somehow through disabling autorun. Actually I find autorun a nuisance anyway and much prefer to leave it off.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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