I think the hard drive light being on 24 7 might have been caused by a loose connection or the order of which my power cables were hooked up... It now seems to be working normally. I believe however that most modern bioses have an option to spin the drive down if it's been idle for so long. I have mine set to do this which is why I was concerned that the light was on after 8 hours of me not sitting at it, and not going on and off. just on. It seems I had that problem just before one of my other HDs went bad. swap can be turned off, and hdparm (I've been told) doesn't work on SATA's you have to use sdparm, because linux thinks it's a SCSI drive. Also since i run gentoo I know when the "crons" and things run... so I had already eliminated that. like i said though seems to be working normally again... I think it was just a cable.