Most of the people don’t care or more specifically don’t know about HDD led. What is HDD LED? What do they do? If you have come here to seek the answers to these question, firstly congratulations, you are not included in those common people. In a computer, HDD LED is used as an indicator to inform your hard drive’s usage status. You will know probably everything that you need to know about HDD LED in the following. Enjoy knowing.
What is HDD LED
HDD LED which is also referred as hard drive activity light is a LED light that keeps illuminating whenever the hard drive or any build in storage in your PC is at any usage. When your storage is being written to or read from, the light will be on or maybe flashing repeatedly. As you will wonder, it is in a way very useful.
It’s important to know when your computer’s hard drive is being accessed so that you can always avoid removing the battery or unplugging the computer time to time while the OS is still accessing some files on the drive. Moreover, there will be a subtraction of an often mistake that can cause corruption and loss of valuable files and damage to the hard drive.
It is also known as hard drive activity indicator.
Now among you who are reading about HDD LED for the first time may have a simple question arisen in mind. Where does the light locate on a computer?
If you have a desktop, the HDD LED light is usually positioned at the front of the computer case. And on a laptop, it is located usually near the power button or sometimes next to the keyboard maybe or on some time on some edge of the computer also. The HDD LED light has a variety of color too. Most of the time the color is white, but eventually, you will find some other color lights also.
You can identify the HDD LED very easily on your PC. Check out which of the light is blinking or flashing repeatedly. That one is the HDD LED.
Why Hard Drive Lights Flash Always
When you are using your computer (you are using your hard drive), it is completely normal for the HDD LED light to keep flashing on and off repeatedly. This means that your hard drive is working, i. e. there are some reads or writes going on on your hard drive.
Sometimes, you would have noticed when you stepped away from your computer and after some time came back, the HDD LED still flashes. I would like to tell you, it’s also quite normal and there is nothing to worry about this. All usual Windows systems do this regularly. Yes, of course, there might be a possibility of malware. if you’re worried about it too much, you can run an antimalware scan any time.
When you are not doing anything on your computer, the computer may have some background tasks to do. Upon this issue, your computer is behaving smartly. It waits very politely until the background tasks are finished. So you see the flashes of the LED lights, in spite of the computer being idle sometimes.
What Is It Doing in Background
I have mentioned above about the background tasks of your computer. So what does your computer do exactly in the background? These tasks basically depend on which software you have on your PC and their configurations.
Some of the common background tasks are described for you at the below-
Index Files
All the operating systems of modern times include file-indexing services usually. This has been a common process actually. The process crawls through the total hard drive of your PC and includes the tasks like examining each file, the text inside it and making a database. You will realize it; you get fast and instant search results from the PC database when you use the search feature of your operating system. Forgiving you this service, the indexing service has to visit your files, index them as well as watch them for changes which ultimately cause hard disk activity.
Defrags HDD
In the past time Windows, before defragmenting your hard drive, you had to close other programs on your computer. Modern times Windows has a great improvement on this. The present Windows in the background do the disc-fragmentation automatically while it is necessary. Though it is configured to do this at a particular time when the computer is idle.
Antivirus Scan
The security tools like antivirus programs are often scheduled to do antivirus scans on regular basis by default in your computer. When your computer is idle, maybe your antivirus tools are working, probably it is sorting through the hard drives and examining the files in it. That also indicates hard disk activity.
Backing Ups
It actually depends on your set-up configuration. If you have those automatic backup setups in your computer, at the idle time, your back-up service might be doing a usual backup.
Auto Updates of Windows
I hope you know that the Windows itself and also many other programs like Google Chrome have the automatic updater. Sometimes, it’s good and sometimes feels odd for many reasons. So if you see some hard drive activity when your PC is idle, maybe somewhere in your PC something is downloading or updating without your knowledge.
In the above, I have described only five things that computer does in the background. The number can be many depending on the software collection of your computer and their configurations. And so there will be hard drive activity too.
If HDD LED is not Blinking But always ON
If your HDD LED is illuminating continuously without any interruption, even when your computer isn’t on, it is possible that your computer might be locked or there may be some malfunction.
In these situations, from your part what you can do is, restart manually. It means that you can pull the power cable or remove the battery to switch off all the components of your computer perfectly. Afterwards, if you can access your computer, you should restart your device in a proper way and check if it’s alright. And if that doesn’t work and you are concerned about your HDD LED, you should take your device for servicing.
How to See What Hard Drive is Doing
If you want to know what your computer hard drive is doing, you can easily monitor its activity. For this, Windows Task Manager or Resource Monitor can be used to check the hard drive activity delicately.
To open the Task Manager, you need to have a right click to your taskbar and selecting Task Manager or you can do it by keyboard shortcut keys Ctrl+Shift+Esc. You can see there what’s going on. You can see which programs are running and how they are running.
Now if you are Windows 7 user, they usually don’t have this in the Task Manager. But don’t worry; you can still check it in Resource Monitor. You have click on Performance Tab and then open Resource Monitor. There you will see the details.
Summing Up
I hope you know by now that HDD LED light is an important component of your PC. For, it indicates the hard drive activity and usage. Now if anyone asks you- What is HDD LED? I simply expect that you can answer him back quite smoothly. Don’t be too much concerned about the HDD LED. If you are worried about some malfunction, check the background tasks and try the solutions described above; and after that go for service, if you are not satisfied.
Check out your HDD LED when you want to remove your computer parts; your hard disc and PC might be damaged otherwise.
Thanks for being here. Best of luck.
Leave a Reply