Shoutbox

Shawnz, I speak out of experience...and I explicity said "it _can_ indicate", not "it does indicate"... Of course it can mean a defragger or whatever else you set the pc todo after a time. But I speak of dubious activity, not about expected and known activity.

As for formatting or erasing done by malicious stuff, those are obviously just examples, simply reading and writing (eg: logs which will later be send by email) will also light up the led. 

As for defraggers and other stuff like that, if a program shows it is doing something on the hard disk and you don't see the hard disk light lighting up, this too might indicate there is a problem and the program actually may have froozen. Or vica versa, if a program doesn't seem todo anything, but you see the hard disk light flickering, it means the program hasn't froozen and is still busy...

Another example (which happens a lot, see Google): slow or slower than normal running PCs can be caused by many things. If you have a HDD led that is flickering constantly, you can immediatly focus your attention to running programs (many times malicious stuff) and eliminatie a whole lot of other things (too less memory, bad settings in bios, froozen program stealing resources, etc, etc)...


Without a hard disk light you wont (easly) notice all these kind of things (unless you constantly run a hard disk monitor).

HDD light activity (or the lack of it) can be the first step to notice something is not quite right, arguing otherwise is giving wrong info.