The HDD LED light on your computer case shows the current hard disk activity in your computer. But some people usually put their desktop computer cabinet under the table and it is very difficult to see the HDD LED light glowing on or off in such an obscure location. Also some laptops have the HDD LED on the left or the right side of the case which is hard to see. There is nothing much you can do to see the actual HDD LED activity in these cases. But you can install the free HDD LED software on your computer in Windows and see the virtual HDD LED right in your system tray (notification area).
The free HDD LED software is available as a portable program so you do not have to install it. Just download the ZIP archive file, extract the contents and run the Free_HDD_LED.exe file.
When you first run the HDD LED software, it minimizes itself in the notification area located at the bottom right corner of your screen. You can click on this notification area icon to make the tiny window showing hard disk LEDs visible. This window is draggable and you can drag it around wherever you want. These virtual LEDs blink red to indicate disk write activity and blue to indicate disk read activity.
If you right-click on the HDD LED notification area icon, then you can choose various options for it like – autostart with Windows, transparency level of the window, drives to monitor, checking for low hard disk space, hard disk refresh rate etc. among many others.
Free HDD LED shows hard disk drive activity in real time in the notification area. It also features a free disk space monitor which works also for pendrives, network drives and TrueCrypt encrypted drives. It monitors all physical hard disk drives connected to the pc with all the popular interfaces like IDE, SATA and USB.
You can download the free HDD LED from http://www.myportablesoftware.com/freehddled.aspx.