Frequent polling of Drives? is this a bug in 8.1/8.0 ??

Gang I'm noticing something really annoying. I have a Samsung 3 series with samsun SN-208BB dvd/rw running 8.1. all devices installed apparently correctly: no driver warnings, nothing significant in the error log, everything works pretty well frankly.
What's annoying is the frequent polling [implied, that is] of the optical drive - it is empty, it works correctly, but every minute or so, sometimes more sometimes less, it goes into seek, respond, etc... it clicks, makes the cute little noises that opticals do in checking for a disc to play with, then goes dormant again. I see this nowhere on the 7 machines.

anyone know what's up with this?

I got something similar on Vista 32 bit with no service pack. I didn't get noise from the optical drive. But I got this rhythmical LED light on the HD. It drove me nuts. Finally I found a post that said it's the OS checking if there's a disc in the optical drive. The HD was on the same controller. I did the same test the poster did. Disable the optical drive in device manager. The LED activity ceased.

I "fixed" it by putting Windows 7 on the machine.

no, its quite "there" in 8.
not all drives respond in the same way to the inquiry.
disabling is a bit dramatic.
it will not respond annoyingly if either the drive is unlocked/unlatched or something is in there - anything.

I would like to ID the process.

MilesAhead said:

I got something similar on Vista 32 bit with no service pack. I didn't get noise from the optical drive. But I got this rhythmical LED light on the HD. It drove me nuts. Finally I found a post that said it's the OS checking if there's a disc in the optical drive. The HD was on the same controller. I did the same test the poster did. Disable the optical drive in device manager. The LED activity ceased.

I "fixed" it by putting Windows 7 on the machine.

Click to expand...

disabling is a bit dramatic.

Click to expand...

It's a test to verify the cause. Not a fix. The "fix" is to put something opaque over the LED, or change to a different OS/driver that doesn't have that side-effect. It just so happened in my case that W7 didn't have the side-effect. I had a second machine with Vista. On that machine the disk LED didn't show the polling. But red LEDs inside the box near the memory stick slots did.