Ebon-Hawk: New operating systems (past Vista) as well as servers maintain constant contact with HDD as part of the awareness and diagnostics routines, while this can be disabled via group policy it is enabled by default.
What I would suggest is for you to look for the case that has a proper implementation of HDD LED. Cases I personally use no longer have LEDs as I see no point in seeing it constantly flash at me.
There is a really decent software available at www.binaryfortress.com that will add a Sys Tray icon to represent your HDD activity so the LED for that can go.
muun: The LED wasn't the problem. The incessant disk accesses were the problem. But now I have FINALLY solved that, like I should have 6 months ago. I installed RAID drivers when I built my system, but the anticipated RAID setup never happened. I didn't think to uninstall the drivers, but I should have. I believe the culprit was the Intel Rapid Storage Technology, though I also uninstalled the Marvell SATA Controller Driver and the Marvell Storage Utility. Now the HDD LED is quiet when the system is idle. I'm happy -- maybe 93 million disk accesses wasted, but better late than never!
