Blogs Why the hard disk light needs to die

Baffled by this article tbh.

It can serve a purpose in those "is it still loading that 300Mb PS file, or has it hung" situations. Besides.. if the one on the shuttle is irritating, then it's a fault of the case designers for putting an insanely bright LED in it.

A subtle, not too bright and well placed LED for drive activity is a useful thing sometimes. The ones in my case are hardly noticable unless you actually look away from the monitor and at the case.

 

What we (ok, I) don't need anymore...

HDD lights.
Floppy ports on mobos
IDE ports on mobos
Serial ports
Parallel ports
VGA ports
PCMCIA

While I don't see the point of the article, I do agree with the message about cutting the cord on these legacy technologies already. Apple has mostly done that on their laptops (or in some cases never had it to begin with) and Dell is following suit with the E series Latitude laptops. If you need any legacy stuff they offer a special dock that still has those ports, otherwise you just get current stuff USB, ESATA, Displayport and a VGA just in case. And on Dell's smaller units the PCMCIA got dropped too.

 

Quite bizarre article really.

Apart from laptops, it's completely trivial to disable the LED if it annoys you, though a BIOS option for it sounds a good idea.

While the HDD indicator is no longer a 'black or white' indicator of PC activity, it's still incredibly handy.
As someone else mentioned as an example: seeing if a laptop logging in is taking a long time due to it waiting for a network resource (generally no disk activity) or applying settings/downloading profile (disk activity).

personally i find it so annoying not having a HDD light, i actually went to the trouble of modding in a LED for my RAID card when i first got it as it was driving me nuts not knowing what it was doing.
Now i have a proper caddy for it, with individual LED's for each drive, so i know exactly which of my 4 drives is most dodgy in the array, useful information!

 

A simple application of electrical tape solved my woes. Sure, it isn't anything fancy or elegant, but it allows for a bit of light to bleed out the edges so I can still see the HDD indicator light when required, but at the same time it isn't glaringly - or in this case 'blinkingly' obvious.

Easy to attach, and easy to remove.
(It may be of interest to note that my room prior to the consumption of an entire roll of electrical tape looked like it was a server room which was also the housing unit for several R2 series astronomech droids as well as the T-1000 Terminator. )

 

I find having a HDD activity light very usefull. I don't have numlock lights etc due to having a wireless keyboard and mouse.

However having said that I do agree that at night they can be a little annoying. What i'm doing in project Muse is having a circuit that dims all of the leds down when the light level in the room drops, that and the fact that all my leds are connceted to small pieces of fibre optic cable so I only have 1mm points of light makes them alot less intrusive.

Again though if they really annoy you that much just unplug them, but I agree that an option in the bios to turn them on/off would be good.

 

Can I have my five minutes back? Sorry if I step on anyone's toes but to gripe about something as trivial as a HDD activity light sounds more like a case of the "my ***** hurts" than anything.

 

that is the best idea i've read all thread!! an ambient light sensor.

Apple's Macbook has it, and they work beautifully, iPhone has it although updates a little slow, but also works fantastic. now why can't PC monitors and cases have their ambient light sensor, and adjust accordingly.

 

The hard disk led is quite usefull. Modern harddrives are very silent, but a process using the harddrive can slow down the entire computer. The harddrive is regularly a bottleneck, so it's usefull that when the computer is slow, you can see where the problem is. A task manager won't give you harddrive usage. processes only using a very small amount of the processor can slow the complete computer down with harddrive usage.

 

Just don't plug it in...

 

man the marketing bods really have got to you haven't they. Silent is not a sliding scale its a lack of noise!

Modern harddrives are very quiet

 

LOL.. this thread is surreal!

Like HD lights... leave it alone... hate them, don't plug 'em in.


Hardly worth column inches. Slow week is it Bit? LOL


I have to go now, I'm writing an article about car indicators that click too loudly.

 

My HDD light makes the room glow purple, combined with the blue power light, when the HDD is working it makes it shine nice and purple, I like it like that.

Anyhos, its very useful for me, as I have no numlock light. so HDD light is very usefull to see if the system has locked up.

FOA Pookeyhead, I love the indicators on my new Fiat Scudo van, they have a very nice tone to them, also the indicators on my Mitsi are little too loud.

Regards
GiGo

 

I like hard drive lights, except mine doesn't work. I should investigate further one day. I've got readouts on my Sidebar that are supposed to tell me if they're doing anything, but they aren't obvious enough.

I miss my hard drive light.

 

Agreed. Pretty much hope no-one was paid money for it - I know that's harsh, but seriously, HDD lights? Unplug or don't, your choice.

 

Yeah, if the rest of the blog entries are going to be as pointless as this, give us the column bit back with longer articles that people thought about before writing.

 

the HDD light is far less stupid than the power light. why the hell would i need an led to tell me that the computer is turned on? if it's on, i can see a picture on my screen.

edit: and to all you people whining about how this is a lame topic for an article or column: yeah, that's the point of the blog. it's a space for unimportant little things like rants about hdd lights, without wasting a proper column.

 

I say if it annoys you,just go and get some electrical tape, cut it to size, and cover it up. I on the other hand then to like the annoying lights so i try to attach as many as i can to my machine. Cyborg keyboard and Razer mouse Cheesecake!!!!

 

My HDD, DVD Drives, MB lights, Network card, etc, all have lights and have a language associated with the number of blinks, or how many are on or off. I think if you understand the language instead of thinking its randomly blinking away to annoy you then you would be at peace with it and find use from them.

 

[QUOTEeven if the system is built as quiet as possible, you will still have other lights to indecate the ON status, eg, NumLock on keyboard, Mouse light.[/QUOTE]

Not so. My KB and mouse both turn their leds off after a short while of no activity.

The whole discussion reminds me of one I often have at work.
Them: Can you please remove the options in this area, I never use them.
Me: If you don't use them, why are they a problem? If you aren't interested in those option, simply ignore them.

So, if you aren't interested in the disk light or the power light, ignore them!
"Too much information" is an oxymoron, as is "too many options".

 

What, don't you want hard drives in your PC? Or did you mean PATA? ;P