Free HDD LED is a small but useful utility that shows you hard disk activity. Almost all computers have external LEDs that do this but that does not mean that this program is useless. If for some reason, you need to monitor the activity of your drives constantly, this utility comes with some good features. It monitors and displays blinking icons for all the partitions, which means that you can see specifically where the activity is. The icons flash with a red color or a blue color, to help you differentiate between reading and writing operations.
The installation kit is a simple ZIP file containing just a “read me” text and the executable file of the application. No setup is included, which could be a problem for inexperienced users.
No help file is included and maybe it is not even needed for such simple software, but there’s one thing that should at least have a tool tip. It doesn’t seem to say anywhere if red blinking is for reading or for writing activity. The same goes for blue.
LEDs are durable but sometimes they burn out too. If your laptop/computer has this problem with the hard disk activity LED, this utility can be the solution… until you replace the component.

AA Senior editor

Alexandru Andrei

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Alan Smithee

I use a laptop in a docking station and run automated and ad-hoc backups. My laptop's disk activity LEDs as so small, inconspicuous and inconveniently located that I cannot detect if disk activity is indeed occurring. This utility helps with that very nicely. A similar situation is true of my desktop machine, it is mounted where it is cumbersome to view the disk activity lights (which are also small and inconspicuous), I like this utility.

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Guest

Have used it to read from one disk and write to another. Blue is read and red is write.