New laptops not having a hard drive light?

Forums › Laptops and mobile computers › New laptops not having a hard drive light?

stu28

273 posts

Ultimate Geek

#228830 24-Jan-2018 16:52

I have been starting to look for a new laptops and I have noticed a lot of them (especially Acer laptops), Don't have a hard drive light, on ether the front of on the side of them.

Has anyone else found this?

If the laptop does not have a hard drive light, how do you know what's going on with the hard drive??

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8961 posts

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#1946184 24-Jan-2018 17:01

Can't remember the last time I had a hard drive light on anything, including a laptop. Never found it necessary.

Not only that, but with an SSD, it's probably even less relevant.

hio77

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#1946191 24-Jan-2018 17:12

Well hdd lights are hardly fun....

Unless you make them RGB! then it will be hip and back in fashion ;)

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Starscream122

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#1946206 24-Jan-2018 17:51

I find them to be really good. you can tell when your computer is accessing the disk or not like if your computer freezes.

sbiddle

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#1946210 24-Jan-2018 18:03

I can't recall the last time I looked at or cared about a HDD light. It would have been 10+ years ago at a bare minimum.

Item

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#1946213 24-Jan-2018 18:06

As others have said, they have ceased to be useful now that SSDs are the norm.

Behodar

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#1946215 24-Jan-2018 18:09

Starscream122:

I find them to be really good. you can tell when your computer is accessing the disk or not like if your computer freezes.

And this is still the case even with SSDs. My machine even has a reset button!

stu28

273 posts

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#1946231 24-Jan-2018 18:57

Item:

As others have said, they have ceased to be useful now that SSDs are the norm.

Are they?, as all the laptops I have looked at in the shops, don't have SSDs.

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richms

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#1946241 24-Jan-2018 19:16

I look at my works desktop PCs HDD light pretending to be a power LED and keep getting the urge to throw it out the window onto the traintracks to get "repaired" into something useful. Other than that I just find them annoying. Pulled the plug on my home PC one because it was bright and kept flashing occasionally lighting the room up.

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#1946250 24-Jan-2018 19:32

stu28:

Item:

As others have said, they have ceased to be useful now that SSDs are the norm.

Are they?, as all the laptops I have looked at in the shops, don't have SSDs.

Agreed.... the norm for many of us, but I would think less than 20% of new consumer computers are sold with SSDs

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alasta

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#1946275 24-Jan-2018 20:45

I have owned various Mac laptops since 2003 and none of them have had a hard drive busy indicator. It's honestly not something that I've ever thought about.

Behodar

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#1946279 24-Jan-2018 21:00

alasta:

I have owned various Mac laptops since 2003 and none of them have had a hard drive busy indicator. It's honestly not something that I've ever thought about.

I'm not aware of any Mac ever having a light, even when the lights were commonplace on DOS machines. Macs have always been "a bit different" and I'm not sure whether it's a fair comparison in this case.

gehenna

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#1946287 24-Jan-2018 21:16

stu28:

Are they?, as all the laptops I have looked at in the shops, don't have SSDs.

Then you're looking at the wrong laptops IMO. It's the spinning hard drive that is the slowest part of a computer and the main bottleneck, and replacing that with an SSD in a poor performing computer is easily the best upgrade you can apply, so buying a new laptop without an SSD is downright dumb these days (Again IMO, not specifically calling anyone dumb).

Sure, you can get a laptop with a 1TB or bigger spinning drive, just be aware it'll be a sluggish and power hungry device that runs hot and with much less battery life than a laptop with an SSD. Laptops are mobile devices, so you need to weigh up what's important to you in the device - battery life and speed, or storage capacity. But even having said that, 256GB is ample for most use cases and seems to be the sweet spot for SSDs in consumer laptops atm.

Linux

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#1946305 24-Jan-2018 21:31

stu28:

Item:

As others have said, they have ceased to be useful now that SSDs are the norm.

Are they?, as all the laptops I have looked at in the shops, don't have SSDs.

@stu28 What laptops shops do you visit? I helped someone buy a new laptop last week and most of them were SSD

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Wade

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#1946313 24-Jan-2018 22:01

My Toshiba has a light and standard SSD,

cadman

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#1946346 25-Jan-2018 00:09

My 3 y.o. Dell laptop has a two lights in parallel (one on the left side and one above the ESC key) that illuminates with activity on any of the 3 drives - 2x SSD and one HDD.

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