HDD activity light

mrschaucer

Do you know, I've actually got some of that! (Without the syringe though, that looks icky.) The new laptop is MUCH quieter than the old one, so I might just give it a try ...

ARandomMiser

mrschaucer wrote: »

Oh well, looks like no-one's bothered to download one of these programs. I'll live without a light for a bit longer and see how things progress - doubtless I'll get used to not knowing when the HD is crunching away and stop worrying about it ...
Thanks all.

You really do not need it.

Oblivion

mrschaucer wrote: »

Oh well, looks like no-one's bothered to download one of these programs. I'll live without a light for a bit longer and see how things progress - doubtless I'll get used to not knowing when the HD is crunching away and stop worrying about it ...
Thanks all.

I know you wouldn't want it open all the time but you can open Task Manager (Ctrl Alt Del) and go to the performance tab then select Resource Monitor and Disk and that will give you an idea of any particular applications that are making heavy use of the disk.

debitcardmayhem

if you really want to know run perfmon.exe and you will know exactly is running on you Windows 10 machine

paddyrg

It's about as realistic as the 'bars' on a phone ' - a crude guide, but really not telling the whole story as disc access is frequent bursts a lot of the time. Get an SSD, then it'll be even more meaningless ;-)

bsod

http://www.itsamples.com/disk-activity-indicator.html

Johnmcl7

mrschaucer wrote: »

Oh well, looks like no-one's bothered to download one of these programs. I'll live without a light for a bit longer and see how things progress - doubtless I'll get used to not knowing when the HD is crunching away and stop worrying about it ...
Thanks all.

Assuming you're running Windows 8 onwards, the new Windows task manager will give you a lot of useful realtime data on what your hard drive is doing. On the main processes screen if you click more details it will show a list of processes with CPU time, memory, disk usage and network usage allowing you to immediately spot if something is hammering the hard drive. If you click the Performance tab then disk on the left hand side you'll get more detailed graphs showing an overall view of your hard drive usage and then if you click the Resource Monitor button you can see a more detailed view to help narrow down any issues.

I find that is useful and haven't needed to download a separate program. That said I do find the lack of activity light on newer machines irritating but in general computers seem to be taking steps backwards in functionality.

John