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by AlisdairSH 4569 days ago
99% of computer users have no idea what you just typed.

HDD light blinking? That means it's working correctly. Am I right?

2 comments

>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.

Sure, but that remaining 1% is who those 99% go to when their computer isn't working properly.
In 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.

The 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.

We are the one percent? (sorry)