Blogs Why the hard disk light needs to die

Why bother with an HDD LED if each of my 5 fans have 4 or 5 flashy LEDs themselves, turning my PC into a friggin' Christmas tree?!?

I like the LED. It helps to know when certain things are running like they're supposed to (or not).

 

IDE is one of the "conventional" ATA formats (PATA). pretty much every PATA device is an IDE device....

and there is this great new thing called SATA, it runs HDD's now

 

I don't mind it. The only time I don't want it on is when I'm trying to sleep, it's bright enough to light a small room

 

and SATA is Integrated Drive Electronics just like PATA, which was my point. No IDE, no SATA.

 

The HDD light tells me from afar that my backup's finished ;-)

Sometimes when my pc is idling (I'm reading an ebook for instance) and all of the susdden the HDD light tells me SOMETHING is happening. I usually find a timed virusscanner or defragmentation or something like that starting to run.
(They also do it while i'm working and i just wonder why the thing isn't responding)
The HDD light shows me the cause.

 

Not even from afar. I have ghost set to back up at 9pm every night. If I'm in a full screen application and I see the hard drive light come on, and stay on at 9pm, this reminds me that it's running and not to start doing something that will hammer the drives for the next 10 minutes.

Like I said earlier this is just one man's irrational rant at something that isn't really a problem for the massive majority of people. The author of this blog entry should simple remove the side panel from his PC and unplug the wires to the HD header, and stop wasting our time with puerile, almost adolescent ranting.

Nothing wrong with the HD light. I for one am happy it's there. Unplug it you're not.

 

My p182 doesn't even have a HDD activity LED, which pleased me immensely. I agree, they're redundant and distracting.
A little LCD readout of CPU load would be much, much more useful. In fact, it would own. I understand you can buy/mod them, I may look into it.

 

P182 have 2 HD lights inside the door.

i am trying find the energy to convert one of the HD light inside the door into power LED. so the machine is discreet unless the door is open. (needs convert because power LED are 3pin connectors with mid-pin being empty, while HD lights are 2pin connectors)

 

just try plugging your 2-pin connector in. it should work.

 

motherboard power LED is also 3pin with mid-pin being empty.......... so plugging the 2pin would leave one unconnected pin either way

 

then you have a weiiiird mobo

all mobos i've seen have bog standard 2pin headers, just like the hd led headers.

 

There's always been a difference, IIRC it used to always be Gigabytes that were different, but some manufacturers change it depending on their own personal choices. Just wrap the cables round the +/-ive pins respectively

 

When I first moved my system into my case I wired up the HDD light with the wrong polarity and didn't notice for a few months - so I had no HDD light during this period. But like the first black president of America (Morgan Freeman) said, "life goes on".

Now I have a much quieter HDD I prefer to have it plugged it, it's handy to see why my Q6600 is being quite so slow. It's very much dwarfed by the optical and audio output of my Nine Hundred, but meh.

As many people have said, if you don't like it - just unplug.

 

you mean the pin header on the motherboard is missing a pin, or that the connector on the wire is two wires with an empty socket inbetween? as long as there are three adjacent pins on the mobo, either a 2 or 3 pin connector should work, as it's one active pin and two gnd pins, and you just have to make a connection between the active and one of the gnds.