It's extremely reassuring to see that hard drive activity light flashing to the beat of moving data. But suppose you have no activity light? With no LED, how will you know if everything's okay with your PC's HDD? Easy: Try Free HDD LED and see the light. My Portable Software's freeware displays the activity of your system's disk drives, including portable drives, in three places: a flashing system tray icon, a desktop gadget, and even your keyboard's scroll lock LED. It also monitors disk space and can even issue warnings when free space is running low.
- HddLed Indicator is a tool to see hard disk drive and SSD activity the same way as a hardware led. If you use your PC remotely or your laptop or ultrabook has no hardware activity led at all, HddLed Indicator will help to monitor storage activity including removable flash drives.
- Feb 04, 2019 Download Activity Indicator for free. Windows tray HDD led like indicator with keyboard lights support. The Activity Indicator utility is a simple program that indicates the HDD activity in the system tray. It contains advanced logging capabilities and friendly interface.
The first thing we did when we ran the fully portable Free HDD LED was to click Customize in the system tray and change Free HDD LED's options to Show Icon and Notifications. This made the icon sticky since an icon that flashes to show HDD activity is no good if you can't see it! But we had another choice, a draggable desktop gadget that displayed all our disk drives, including portable drives, in a compact row of activity indicators that also displayed each drive's capacity when we hovered our cursor over it. That's not the end of Free HDD LED's options, either. Right-clicking the tray menu or gadget opened an extensive menu of settings, including Autostart with Windows, HDD refresh rate, disk space tool, transparency settings, and updates. A pop-up warned us that enabling the blinking scroll lock feature might cause 'some strange collateral effects,' but we tried it anyway. We didn't notice anything strange (at least, not with our system) and it's definitely a valuable option.
Free HDD LED shows hard disk drive activity in real time in the systray area and on screen. It emulates the physical hard disk drive led. Very useful on PC, laptop or netbook which don't have it.
PCs used to have real HDD LEDs on their case fronts, but Free HDD LED is actually way better because it not only saves energy by eliminating another LED but also monitors disk space.
What do you need to know about free software?
It's extremely reassuring to see that hard drive activity light flashing to the beat of moving data. But suppose you have no activity light? With no LED, how will you know if everything's okay with your PC's HDD? Easy: Try Free HDD LED and see the light. My Portable Software's freeware displays the activity of your system's disk drives, including portable drives, in three places: a flashing system tray icon, a desktop gadget, and even your keyboard's scroll lock LED. It also monitors disk space and can even issue warnings when free space is running low.
The first thing we did when we ran the fully portable Free HDD LED was to click Customize in the system tray and change Free HDD LED's options to Show Icon and Notifications. This made the icon sticky since an icon that flashes to show HDD activity is no good if you can't see it! But we had another choice, a draggable desktop gadget that displayed all our disk drives, including portable drives, in a compact row of activity indicators that also displayed each drive's capacity when we hovered our cursor over it. That's not the end of Free HDD LED's options, either. Right-clicking the tray menu or gadget opened an extensive menu of settings, including Autostart with Windows, HDD refresh rate, disk space tool, transparency settings, and updates. A pop-up warned us that enabling the blinking scroll lock feature might cause 'some strange collateral effects,' but we tried it anyway. We didn't notice anything strange (at least, not with our system) and it's definitely a valuable option.
PCs used to have real HDD LEDs on their case fronts, but Free HDD LED is actually way better because it not only saves energy by eliminating another LED but also monitors disk space.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like to know when my hard drive is active.
That's partly so I know when Windows has more or less finished its boot activity (which, on one aging machine, takes 7-8 minutes), and partly so I can troubleshoot problems.
For example, if my mouse is suddenly non-responsive, I can check to see if there's still drive activity--and know whether or not I need to force a shutdown.
In the old days, I could hear a drive thrashing inside my desktop. Indeed, that was one sure-fire way to diagnose the insidious 'click of death.' But now that I'm mostly on laptops, which incorporate much quieter drives (or, in the case of SSDs, totally silent drives), I have to rely on LEDs.
Just one problem: They're an endangered species. On my last laptop, an HP Pavilion dm1z, there was a tiny white drive-status LED--but it was inconveniently located on the side of the system, meaning I had to crane my head way over to see if it was flashing.
On my newer Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook, there's no LED at all. And because it has an SSD, I can't even listen for cues. Put simply, there's no way to know if and when there's drive activity.
Thankfully, I found Activity Indicator. True to its name, this freeware utility adds a simple drive-activity 'LED' to the Windows System Tray, thus allowing you to keep tabs on your drive's read/write doings.
This is a surprisingly versatile little tool. For starters, in addition to providing basic drive info (total space, space consumed, etc.), it can save a customizable log of all disk activity, which might prove helpful if you're trying to troubleshoot a problem. In fact, you can review that log right inside the program's settings window, saving it to a file only as needed.
Activity Indicator also provides 18 different icon sets to show drive activity/inactivity, everything from a simple LED-style rectangle (in your choice of six colors) to a little Geiger counter-style meter.
Hdd Led Software
You can even configure it to interact with various keyboard LEDs (if your system has them), lighting up, say, the NumLock key whenever there's drive activity. However, when I tried this on my Samsung, pairing it with the CapsLock key, it triggered the actual Caps Lock every time there was activity. That made for interesting typing. (I had to disable that option, natch.)
To make the most of Activity Indicator, you'll need to do two things. First, modify your System Tray so the indicator stays visible at all times. (Specifically, set it to 'Show icon and notifications.')
Second, because the utility lacks a 'run at startup' option, you'll have to load it manually each time you start Windows--or not, if you add it to your Startup folder. (In a future post I'll explain how Windows 8 users can do that.)
Even with that minor annoyance, Activity Indicator is a handy little problem-solver.
Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at [email protected], or try the treasure trove of helpful folks in the PC World Community Forums. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.
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