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Free HDD LED

By My Portable Software Free Editors' Rating

Editors' Review

Download.com Staff Apr 17, 2013

It's extremely reassuring to see that hard drive activity light flashing to the beat of moving data. But suppose you have no activity light? With no LED, how will you know if everything's okay with your PC's HDD? Easy: Try Free HDD LED and see the light. My Portable Software's freeware displays the activity of your system's disk drives, including portable drives, in three places: a flashing system tray icon, a desktop gadget, and even your keyboard's scroll lock LED. It also monitors disk space and can even issue warnings when free space is running low.

The first thing we did when we ran the fully portable Free HDD LED was to click Customize in the system tray and change Free HDD LED's options to Show Icon and Notifications. This made the icon sticky since an icon that flashes to show HDD activity is no good if you can't see it! But we had another choice, a draggable desktop gadget that displayed all our disk drives, including portable drives, in a compact row of activity indicators that also displayed each drive's capacity when we hovered our cursor over it. That's not the end of Free HDD LED's options, either. Right-clicking the tray menu or gadget opened an extensive menu of settings, including Autostart with Windows, HDD refresh rate, disk space tool, transparency settings, and updates. A pop-up warned us that enabling the blinking scroll lock feature might cause "some strange collateral effects," but we tried it anyway. We didn't notice anything strange (at least, not with our system) and it's definitely a valuable option.

PCs used to have real HDD LEDs on their case fronts, but Free HDD LED is actually way better because it not only saves energy by eliminating another LED but also monitors disk space.

Full Specifications

What's new in version 2.01

General

Release July 10, 2015
Date Added July 10, 2015
Version 2.01

Operating Systems

Operating Systems Windows 8, Windows Vista, Windows, Windows 7, Windows XP
Additional Requirements Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0/3.5

Popularity

Total Downloads 21,098
Downloads Last Week 0
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2.3/5
12 User Votes
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Developer's Description

Free HDD LED monitors all physical hard disk drives connected to the pc (IDE, SATA, or USB). This software is useful if your PC doesn't have a HDD Led or if it is not visible. Free HDD LED shows hard disk drive activity in real time in the system tray area. It also features a free disk space monitor (works also for pen drives, network drives and TrueCrypt drives).
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