A computer in normal operation will have intermittent disk accesses if the system stops responding and there is no disk activity whatsoever for several minutes, chances are very good it needs to be forcibly rebooted. A more comprehensive way to monitor disk activity is to use Task Manager, which as of Windows 8 can show disk activity.Įven so, the light is still of use to determine if the system is loading data from disk or is completely hung. In fact, many newer PCs, especially thin-and-light laptops, omit the light altogether. This still holds true for modern PCs that are configured to boot and run applications from a electromechanical hard drive, but with the increasingly widespread use of solid-state drives which can access data in a matter of microseconds rather than milliseconds, the amount of time the system spends waiting for disk is far less, and the disk activity light is of less value on systems with SSDs. If the system seemed stuck but the disk activity light was on, chances were good that the system was just waiting for the disk rather than actually hung. Before the advent of solid-state drives, long load times for the OS and applications were the norm, and while one could hear the hard disk seeking, the light was a much more reliable indicator of disk activity since sequential I/O is not noticeably noisier than disk idle. The main purpose of the light is to allow the user to determine if the system is busy due to disk activity. Shown here is an IBM 350 disk unit used with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer, which dates back to the 1950s. The disk stacks themselves on those drives were designed to be physically interchangeable. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.The disk activity light looks like a cylinder because early hard disk drives for mainframes consisted of large cylinders of platters and corresponding sets of read/write heads. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |