What is the origin of the hard drive light?

Question

In practically every computer I've had, there's always been a light to display hard drive activity. What's it's origin and original use?

Answer 1

Well, I can say, as an engineer for MiniScribe (later Maxtor), it's exactly what it appears to be. It's an "activity" light. It was a way for us to tell that a command had been received through the interface and was underway. It was a debugging tool for those of us who, you know, built disk drives.

Answer 2

Floppy drives always had activity lights too, as you did not want to accidentally eject the disk while it was still being used.

It was also useful to see if your shell command was being executed as expected. Hard drives just continued to include what everybody was used to having on floppies.

There was a HDD activity light on the 20MB HDD for my Amiga A500.

Also, if you think about early mainframe computers, the only realtime feedback the operator got was all the activity blinkenlights.

Answer 3

Sometimes it's useful to know if the hard drive is active. For example, if the machine isn't responding in any way, but the hard drive is active, it may be that the system is overloaded and swapping physical memory to swap, but hasn't actually crashed. If this is the case, it may be best to wait for the slow operation to finish, rather than rebooting the machine.

These days, Windows is more stable and multi-task scheduling tends to work better, so there are probably fewer cases where it is useful.

Answer 4

Long hard drive operations usually occures when user is waiting for something, for example loading game - when a screen can be black. I think this is some indicator, that have to tell user, that computer doesn't hang up, and some task will be completed after a while.

Also when there is too few ram memory, old computers lose lot of speed and because of swp file and not that stable and complex OS's like today - it can appear to be hanged, it's helpfull to user to tell him that computer is working on some data and be ready soon.

Answer 5

Need for Hard-disk LED lights

• The hard-disk LED normally flickers on when the hard disk is being accessed.

• Hence it gives you a visual indication of how active your system is, and can help ensure that you don't shut off your system while the hard disk is active

  ---

• In older Computer this LED was connected directly to the hard-disk.

• Now-a-days they connected to the motherboard which is preferred in-case you have more than one hard disk so that the system can activate the light whenever any of them are accessed.

Just to inform that if your hard disk doesn't have an led indicator then you may simply use this software http://www.hddled.com/

Answer 6

As a side note, and some extra historical information, the HD LED on cases and motherboards is an overall (ie, aggregate) activity indicator for all of the (IDE, SATA, SCSI, etc.) drives in the system except floppies—watch the LED when burning a CD/DVD; it shows the activity for the HDD and the optical drive.

However, as seen below, most hard-drives in the past had a 2-pin connector on the circuit board (and even today, some may have them, though likely without the actual pins in place, thus requiring some soldering) that could be connected to an LED. That means that each hard-drive could have its own activity indicator (optical drives don’t generally have the LED connector). That said, in those days, (consumer) systems were generally limited to two (or at most four) IDE drives anyway.

It was quite cool to have multiple LEDs to show the activity for each drive and was a sort of “mod” at the time.

---

These days, software is more suited to showing the activity for each drive.

Answer 7

I don't think it has a well-defined origin. It seems such a natural feature, that it was probably always included as a matter of course.