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At some point there was a Mac OS (classic Mac OS in the 90s) that displayed a hard disk activity icon to the left of the Apple menu icon. I’ve looked for the na

At some point there was a Mac OS (classic Mac OS in the 90s) that displayed a hard disk activity icon to the left of the Apple menu icon. I’ve looked for the name of the utility or setting off and in for years and have been unable to find any mention of it. I seem to recall seeing it on many unrelated Macs, which made me think it was a system setting, but having gone back through several system versions I’ve never been able to find it. Not quite the same as what TFM has made (which is awesome), but hearing the crunch of a hard drive and seeing that LED flash or the activity indicator blink are so pleasantly nostalgic.

kalleboo 4y ago
The "Disk Light" CDEV was a component of early versions of Norton Utilities for Mac. We had it on our Mac Classic and it definitely conjures up a ton of nostalgia to me too!
kn0where 4y ago
Third party disk formatting utilities like Silverlining had the option to have an on-screen hard disk activity “light” like you describe.
yreg 4y ago
iStat Menus offer this for modern macOS. The disk activity is not that relevant for me, but networking is useful. When I'm waiting for something and there is no network activity I know something's fishy. https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/ https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/
- abdusco 4y ago
  open source alternative that i've been using: https://github.com/exelban/stats https://github.com/exelban/stats
  - yreg 4y ago
    Nice! Thanks for this.
lproven 4y ago
Norton Disk Indicator, I think. Part of NUM, the Norton Utilities for Mac, later SUM, Symantec UfM IIRC.