The case-mounted LED hard-disk activity indicator isn’t all that good for analysing hard-drive-activity with – Not only because it’s on the front of your computer case; which could be behind you as you view the screen, or under the desk, but also if you have multiple hard-drives you can’t tell which one is active.
Cue FloatLED: This clever little device brings your disk-activity LED on to your screen; which is where you look at everything else. – But not only does it tell you of drive-activity; it also tells you which drive the activity is from, and whether the activity is reading, writing, or both.
This will be a diamond for those of you who have more than one physical drive and know that one of them is making funny noises. – Or for those of you who like to imagine they’re flying the Star Ship Enterprise when they’re sitting at the screen; it’s another flashing indicator.
Beam me up Scotty.
[Latin = Transmittae mae cirtum Caledonum.]
You can download FloatLED from this link.
You’re looking at Kkomp.com – Beyond. <--Link to Home page.
The URL of what you see is http://kkomp.com/2010/11/08/floatled-on-screen-hard-disk-activity-indicator-free-software/
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I have a harddrive activity indicator on my PC and recently it started to blink every few seconds and there is nothing I could do in msconfig to stop this annoying blinking.My PC tech is telling me that this is a signal coming from the motherboard but he could not tell me why this blinking has started just recently. And he could not stop it either. Aside from the annoying blinking my concern is that the harddrive is unneccessary working and will fail that much earlier. I am assuming that the harddrive is spinning at 7200 RPM the moment I am turning on the PC but this blinking indicates the movement of the arm, is that correct ?? I also re-formatted the harddrive and re-installed Windows without any other programs and the blinking is still there. You are my last hope of shedding some light on this, a new motherboard would cost about $ 450.- and is not in my budget right now. Grateful for any reply.
An interesting conundrum you set out here.
Firstly, the blinking indicates a data-read/write, which probably does indicate a movement of the arm.
Now I assume that you’re running Windows. When there’s no room left in RAM for the processor to operate, Windows accesses a paging file on the hard drive and uses it as if it were RAM. It’s a much much slower method of operation than accessing RAM directly, but it works, and the processor uses the hard drive to write notes to as it calculates the necessary equations. When it does so, as you might expect, the hard drive activity indicator indicates this extra read/write activity.
This throws up two main questions: Firstly; has your processor suddenly started doing the above? Also, if so then why?
I’d ask you the following: -
Have you recently installed extra hardware and/or software? Have you recently removed a RAM chip from your computer? Has one or more of your RAM chips malfunctioned for any number of reasons?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then that is possibly why your processor has started to access the paging file a lot more. More specifically, the processor isn’t finding enough room in the working RAM, and is therefore using the hard drive as if it were RAM.
So if this is indeed the case, what can you do to avoid it happening? There are 3 solutions that come to mind off the cuff:
The first solution is software-based: Turn off your paging file totally and try running all operations in system RAM only.
The next is concerning hardware: Fit more RAM to your motherboard if you have any spare RAM sockets, or fit new sticks with more capacity.
The last solution is an internal-hardware-fix, and is to earth yourself with a wristband and check that your RAM sticks are in their sockets properly. If any of them are not then they are presenting themselves to the processor as a faulty piece of hardware or as unrecognisable connections and the CPU is therefore ignoring them and using the disc instead. Ensuring that they are all properly in their sockets will ensure a proper electrical connection. Maybe one or more of them may have malfunctioned and will need replacing.
There are many more possible reasons why the situation is as it is; but to cover them all would fill an entire e-book.
I hope that you find this reply of use, or at least of interest.