While playing the game, my hard drive light activity LED is constantly flickering in scratch mode. Is that normal? Instead, shouldn't it occasionally be at rest (with surges and breaks of hard drive activity depending on whether new areas are being loaded)

*shrug*

Mine is always flickering, whether I'm playing a game or not. Granted, I'm always doing something in the background, but it's always flickering. Oblivion has a LOOOOOT of data (being an open-world game and all) and I guess it's just loading things all the time. In addition, you have your OS saving stuff to the page file while you're playing, etc..