Windows 7 or Hard Drive Problem?

[ericlooi]

My hard drive light will keep blinking for few minutes from time to time and sometimes it will slow down the windows operation. Is this the problem of Windows 7 or the hard drive problem?

Is my hard drive going to "die"?

Thanks!

[CLiNT]

By the looks of it, it might be in the process of doing some background read/writes.
Indexing or Sysyem Restore are an example of software processes that may be running in the background
causing hard drive activity.

If your concerned about hard drive health do a checkdisk with error correction and review the S.M.A.R.T data.

[Medico]

Eric,

Welcome to the Lounge.

A little more info might be helpful. Are you getting error messages or crashes when this blinking of the HD activity indicator is taking place? How old is the PC? Do you have any other indications of HD problems, i.e. wierd unexplained problems, program crashes, program hangups, etc. As Clint mentions, Win 7 does a lot of activities when the PC is idle, one of which is indexing files to allow faster searches. Unless other symptoms are present I suspect this is just normal Windows activities.

[ericlooi]

I downloaded the SMART and the hard disk is healthy.

I disabled the indexing and I don't know why it's still busying in the background. My PC is about 3 year-old.

Still can't find out what's wrong. But sometimes after I deleted something, I have to refresh it only to see it disappear from the folder or desktop. Any ideas?

Thanks!

[CLiNT]

Run an antivirus and antimalware check as well, if you havn't already done so.
Also check your networking setup, like networked printers or other devices, they can often be notorious.
Sometimes newer printers can also install networking process capabilities by defalt that would be of little use
if your not actually using them.
There may be many other programs that are potentially capable of drive activity as well. Go through yours for a second
look if you havn't already done so.

^{Still can't find out what's wrong. But sometimes after I deleted something, I have to refresh it only to see it disappear from the folder or desktop. Any ideas?}

This sounds more memory/resource related than hard drive.

[Medico]

I downloaded the SMART and the hard disk is healthy.

I disabled the indexing and I don't know why it's still busying in the background. My PC is about 3 year-old.

Still can't find out what's wrong. But sometimes after I deleted something, I have to refresh it only to see it disappear from the folder or desktop. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Are you talking about deleting as in a file or uninstalling as in an app? You will severly limit search capabilities with indexing disabled. After a very intensive indexing initially , indexing changes is not a real time consuming activity and allows for much quicker searches.

As Clint mentions, any app running in the background could potentially cause HD activity at any given time. For example, while sitting here stareing at my screen and doing nothing, my HD activity indicator light does flash fairly often and I have almost nothing running in the background. The key word is almost nothing. My AV/AM is running and my Alps touchpad app is running along with numerous services. These can all create activity in the HD.