Disk Activity Light ALWAYS blinking

[websquad]

I have a new (two-week-old) XP/Pro machine with a hard drive activity light that seems to blink (indicating disk activity) at random intervals about every half second. And this occurs even if I've been away from the machine for a couple of hours.

1) I've check both my program/system drive array (RAID-1) and data array (also RAID-1) and both do not have "Allow Indexing Service to index..." checked.

2) The top CPU users are
- System Idle Process ... usually 99%
- nScIp.exe
- nSvcAppFlt.exe
- upsd.exe ... I suspect this is polling my UPS
- Task manager
- explorer.exe

3) The System Overview Properties indicate there are some logs:
\Memory\Pages/sec
\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Avg. Disk Queue Lenght
\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time

Apparently these are updated every 15 seconds
... but I suspect these operations use cache and should not be responsible for the I/O

4) There are no shares with other systems

5) I did some searches on nScIp.exe. I am not, so far as I know, running an nVidia firewall. I am running Norton Internet Security 2008.

Any ideas?

 

[Dan O]

You can use a disk monitoring tool to determine which applications are causing the I/O and stop them, to see one that I use see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646.aspx

 

[websquad]

DiskMon really didn't tell me anything. It indicated that is was doing the IO on drive 0, which I assume is my RAID-1 system/program array. But it didn't tell me what program(s) were doing the IO.

So I did some Google searching and came up with FileMon, from www.sysinternals.com. It tells me what process is doing the activity, the type of request (open, close, query informaiton, read, write, directory), the result (Success, path not found, not found, buffer overflow, end of file, no more files)

At 5:26:25 I cleared out everythine and stared with a clean display.

At 5:32:25 I had 2,025 file operations in the 6 minute interval (5.63 / second).

I had already stopped the processes for Mozy on-line backup. During the 6 minute period I found these processes:

upsd.exe:2340 ... Something to do with my Belkin BUlldog Plus UPS backup software
ccSvcHst.exe:288 ... Norton Internet Security 2008
explorer.exe:1236
UltraMonTaskbar:716 ... I have dual monitors and use Ultramon for the extended taskbar
notepad.exe:3840 ... I'm drafting this post using notepad
csrss.exe:1312 ... part of Windows/XP, but my source indicated it could be a virus (say it ain't so on my 2-week-old computer) and pointed me to an instant scan that found nearly 500 registery errors, but would only fix 15 without a payment of $30 ... yikes ....
taskmgr.exe: 2240 ... I did have a copy of Windows Task Manager open but reduced to the taskbar

... and the list goes on.

Should I be concerned about this stuff, or just thankful that my system drive is a pair of 10,000 rpm drives that probably give the the second best disk performance I can hope for (without going to 15,000 rpm drives or solid state)?