Thinkpads Forum

Hi Folks,

I upgraded my X60 HD from 60G 5200PM to 200G 7200PM 16M Hitachi. Everything is working smoothly, but the HD LED is keep blinking periodically every 2 seconds. I turned off index service, and there is no application running in the front. Is it normal or not, may be the Hitachi HD is doing some catch thing itself? I am wondering if this way would eat out my battery power quickly. Is there any application can monitoring HD IO and report it which application is accessing HD ID during the time period?

Thanks for your time.

Steven

x60star wrote:Hi Folks,

I upgraded my X60 HD from 60G 5200PM to 200G 7200PM 16M Hitachi. Everything is working smoothly, but the HD LED is keep blinking periodically every 2 seconds. I turned off index service, and there is no application running in the front. Is it normal or not, may be the Hitachi HD is doing some catch thing itself? I am wondering if this way would eat out my battery power quickly. Is there any application can monitoring HD IO and report it which application is accessing HD ID during the time period?

Thanks for your time.

Steven

Process Explorer and Autoruns both from Systinternals.com work well. They do not require installation and have a tiny footprint when running. Freeware.

mgo wrote:
Process Explorer and Autoruns both from Systinternals.com work well. They do not require installation and have a tiny footprint when running. Freeware.

Thank you mgo. I tried the process explorer and turn off all the services which remain active during the idle period, however the HD LED is still blinking per 2 seconds. Process explorer is lvl too high to show which process actived IRQ 13H. It might be the Hitachi HD internal process, or a very low system lvl process working on the page files. I did hear the HD moving while all process should be idle.
any more hints?

Steven

As a test, disable 'write caching' in the system properties for the hard drive in device manager.

Sysinternals also has a disk monitoring utility,

aaa wrote:Sysinternals also has a disk monitoring utility,

i used Disk monitoring and got the log like this.

0 4:33:42 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 96237303 48
1 4:33:42 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 96217999 8
2 4:33:42 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 96217983 8
3 4:33:43 PM 0.00348091 0 Write 192869967 8
4 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 193212231 8
5 4:33:43 PM 0.00398636 0 Write 192617687 8
6 4:33:43 PM 0.00348091 0 Write 191379543 8
7 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191381999 16
8 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382095 8
9 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382231 8
10 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382375 8
11 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382503 16
12 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382551 8
13 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382599 16
14 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382687 8
15 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382727 8
16 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382767 8
17 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382831 8
18 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382847 8
19 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382863 16
20 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 191382919 8
21 4:33:43 PM 0.00159264 0 Read 193762143 16
22 4:33:44 PM 0.00159264 0 Write 192870007 8
23 4:33:44 PM 0.00348091 0 Write 192869823 8

the HD has 16M catch, may be the HD light indicate system doing some page swap file during idle time period.

Steven

They make two file utilities (filemon?). I think the other shows exactly what's causing the accesses.

aaa wrote:They make two file utilities (filemon?). I think the other shows exactly what's causing the accesses.

Thank you all, now i finally find the reason caused the HD access by using Autoruns and Filemon. There was a speaker device SSCtrl.exe always launch windows media player when window starting up, and windows media player is always monitoring some music library folder and writing ntuser.dat.LOG every two seconds. My HD now quiet like a sleeping baby during idle period after I have disabled the SSCtrl.exe. It indeed save a lot of battery power for me

Thanks again,

Steven