Hard drive won't stop spinning...

[marinebro0306]

Hi,
I have a Dell Inspiron 8600, and for the longest time it's had a very minor annoyance: The hard drive never stops spinning. It has always had this issue, and it can get very irritating. This does not happen on my PC, only on this. Is this normal, or something wrong with my particular notebook?
Thanks!

[adinu]

You mean when you turn the computer it still spins, or while your using the machine?

[Yoob@NBF]

Depends on the notebook drive you have. Hitachi (IBM) drives have a utility you can download which can control accoustics of the drive from hitachi's website.

[marinebro0306]

You mean when you turn the computer it still spins, or while your using the machine?
It is like that all the time...the activity light next to the battery light never stops flickering. Is this something all laptops have?

[Dell-Richard_B]

My name is John, and I am a customer advocate at Dell headquarters. I came across this thread, and wanted to see if you've received an adequate answer.

The behaviour you describe here is perfectly normal. To test this theory, I pulled two separate portables from the lab (an Inspron and a Latitude) and booted them to Windows. They both showed intermittent hard drive activity regardless of the fact that the units were just sitting. Background processes and Windows services were accessing data from the disk while the laptop remained unused. This is fairly normal.

If you feel that your system's symptoms are not normal, or have any other questions, feel free to contact me:

customer_advocate@dell.com
ATTN: John

John
Dell Customer Advocate