4 ms·
Hey, I find the hard drive light very helpful in determining whether my system is thrashing for virtual memory, or likely stuck on some CPU-bound process.
by willismichael 13y ago
Hey, I find the hard drive light very helpful in determining whether my system is thrashing for virtual memory, or likely stuck on some CPU-bound process.
- AlisdairSH 13y ago99% of computer users have no idea what you just typed. HDD light blinking? That means it's working correctly. Am I right?
- Mindless2112 13y agoSure, but that remaining 1% is who those 99% go to when their computer isn't working properly.
- gmisra 13y agoWe are the one percent? (sorry)
- nemothekid 13y agoIn anycase, if I wanted to know if my drive was being trashed, I'd look at command like 'top'. If people can perform remote admin on machines 1000s of miles away without the need of green LEDs, I'm sure consumer tech will do just fine.
- robryk 13y agoThe problem is that getting top to start can take a long time if it's actually thrashing heavily enough. I'd agree that the LED is nonessential with HDDs -- you can just listen; and then you can even make out whether it's doing a lot of seeking or long continuous accesses, but you can't do that with SSDs.
- gizmo686 13y ago>HDD light blinking? That means it's working correctly. Am I right? In a lot of ways that is correct. Generally, when something is thrashing the hard drive it is making actual progress on its task, and its task is relativly short lived. This means that if your computer is going slowly, and the HDD LED is active, you can likely wait for the HDD LED to quiet down. In contrast, when your computer is going slowly (or not responding at all) and your HDD LED is off, it is much more likely that something is wrong and won't resolve itself.
- x0054 13y agoThat's the only LED that I actually miss on my MacBook. So much so that I have a virtual LED for this in the menubar. That and the batter indications LEDs older MacBooks used to have. The rMBP is missing those as well, not sure why they got rid of that.
- nsxwolf 13y agoThis is probably better implemented as a system tray icon.
- Crito 13y agoI have a computer without a hdd indicator light and sometimes I miss it (like when I am fullscreened and a sudden lockup caused by unswapping lots of stuff occurs), but ultimately I haven't found it to be a big deal.
- userbinator 13y agoThings like this are sort of like seatbelts and helmets: you usually don't need it, but when you need it, you REALLY need it.
- anonymfus 13y agoMay be solution could be putting all useful for troubleshooting and annoying in everyday use LEDs under special cover.