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XPS 630 Power/HDD white LED
Is there any way to change these short of cracking open the case? I think it's great that you can use the Nvidia panel to adjust the various lighting zones on the machine, but there's no option on the panel to turn these two WAY TOO BRIGHT lights down (especially noticible in a dim room). Also, the HDD led is flashing ALL THE TIME. Is that because I have a raid-1 setup? Indexing on Win XP is disabled and the light literally never stops flashing (it's not a steady flash, but a series of flashes in different patterns).
DELL-Chris M
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April 18th, 2008 18:00
No and no.
gaijin4life
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April 18th, 2008 18:00
gaijin4life
21 Posts
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April 18th, 2008 18:00
DELL-Chris M
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April 18th, 2008 18:00
Mine flashes all the time. I do not have raid. No idea. Honestly, never noticed it.
gaijin4life
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April 18th, 2008 19:00
Great theory, but I have XP Pro and I have disabled the indexing service completely from the control panel. It's not on manual, it's set to disabled. I thought this was the case, so disabling indexing is the first thing I did.
It still may be the RAID-1 with the Nvidia BIOS, though because perhaps Chris has indexing ON and in his case the flashing is indexing and in my case (indexing disabled) it's RAID.
Still, I'd like to know what's causing it and why. It seems like unnecessarily excessive access of the HDD.
Mzrka
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April 18th, 2008 19:00
Davet50
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April 18th, 2008 19:00
I would back the indexing theory..
DELL-Chris M
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April 18th, 2008 19:00
Just sent the email.
djcypher
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April 18th, 2008 22:00
Indexing may not be off. I had trouble disabling mine on XP. Check to see if it's still running in the process list. Often times it will automatically resume when you reboot.
This is how to make sure it's disabled...
>Control Panel
>Administrative Tools
>Services
>Scroll down to Indexing Service
>Double click in it
>Under "startup type" choose Disable
>Apply
>Restart
It should be truly disabled that way.
gaijin4life
21 Posts
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April 18th, 2008 23:00
That's exactly what I had already done.
The mystery of the hdd activity remains...
willko
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April 19th, 2008 02:00
DELL-Chris M
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April 19th, 2008 03:00
RAID 1 will poll the drive to make sure the bits are equal, just not sure how often.
gaijin4life
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April 19th, 2008 03:00
What concerns me (aside from the annoying light flashing at night) is the unnecessary wear and tear from the constant polling or writing or whatever is going on. I disabled processes one by one tonight and it remained, so I'm pretty sure the accesses are the result of the Nvidia drivers for the SATA (yes, I also tried it with SMART polling disabled, and the flashing remained). I plan to open a trouble ticket with "Premuim XPS care" and see if I can't test how "premium" it is, hopefully getting to the bottom of this and prompt a driver change.
Oh, and BTW, I put a clump of 5 or 6 post-its over it and it tones it down for the present. Less permanent than a sharpie... :)
smuggler
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April 19th, 2008 03:00
ai5u
272 Posts
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April 19th, 2008 04:00
ChrisM-
RAID 1
For Highest performance, the controller must be able to perform two concurrent separate Reads per mirrored pair or two duplicate Writes per mirrored pair.
RAID Level 1 requires a minimum of 2 drives to implement
Characteristics and Advantages
Disadvantages