Flashing HDD LED when ATAPI devices attached

[brywalker]

This is a very odd problem. I have noticed it with the last 2 motherboards I have had, 2 totally different chipsets/CPUs. Whenever there are any ATAPI drives attached to either the primary or secondary IDEs, master or slave or one of each, the HDD LED flashes once every second. Just a quick flash.

Now other than being very annoying, I can't help but think that there is something that is polling that line for data every second and that it could bog down my system. I don't see any stray processes or anything, and it actually does this on first boot from a clean install. My friend has noticed the same thing on his machine, but no one else we know has this issue. And we don't share any identical hardware. If anyone has come across this, please let me know. I have tried 3 different ATAPI devices in all configs and it still does it. My system specs are below:

Windows XP SP1 w/current hotfixes
Abit IC7-MAX 3
P4 2.6c @ 3.4GHz
2 x 512 OCZ PC3200 DDR
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
2 x 80GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9
Lite On LTR-2410b
Optorite DD0203
Antec True Power 550
Koolance 601 Case

[ThePerfectCore]

Do you have the Indexing Service in XP running?

</random stab in the dark>

[donny_paycheck]

Mine do this too. It's just the controller talking to the drives, and it doesn't involve CPU cycles so there is no encumberence on system performance.

[brywalker]

Yeah, but why?

I don't have indexing enabled.

And it only does it in XP, not DOS or a non OS environment.