One of the remaining problems I have with my newly-built P55-US3L is one that I've briefly mentioned in other postings here, namely that of constant and very regular accesses to the hard drive. The latter is never in an idle state, and clearly something is amiss. Frankly, the HDD is going to rapidly wear out unless it's fixed. Thus far, I've been unable to determine the process causing it.
I'm able to observe these accesses by means of the "HDD activity" LED on the the PC's casing. The accesses are at a constant rate of about one every three-quarters of a second, so it's as though something is polling the HDD, and maybe other resources on the machine. During bootup, or when the BIOS has been opened, these accesses do not occur; it's only once Windows has booted that they start.
Something else I'm getting is random accesses to the floppy-disc drive. Quite often, a spurious access to the FDD will occur when I'm clicking the USB mouse, so there may be a connection of this with the otherwise totally random nature of the FDD accesses, and also the regular HDD accesses. At other times, the FDD accesses (you can hear the FDD mechanism whirr as it's accessed) occur of their own accord. The cable from the board to the FDD was thoroughly checked out by me some time ago and I've successfully used floppy discs in the drive.
I've no reason to think that the HDD problem is caused by any legitimate background process. For instance, the accesses remain even if I disable my antivirus and software firewall.
I've had a look in Windows's Task Manager. If, in turn, I highlight each process listed there, the highlight pulses in sympathy with the HDD accesses, so clearly the accesses are interrupting these legitimate processes. But I'm loath to disable each process in that list to try to pinpoint the cause, even temporarily, as Windows advises against it.
Note that I've not installed a driver for the GSATA chip, as I'm not using RAID. So, I'm wondering if I was correct to not install the driver, even so. Could the BIOS be constantly searching for a driver for this chip? Does part of the GSATA chip handle mouse and floppy-disc operations, ie. I/O on the H55's LPC bus? (See block schematic in the user's manual).
My gut feeling is that the HDD accessing is somehow linked to the random FDD accesses.
Anyone else noticed anything like this?