Question: I’ve just got a new Dell Inspiron, and I’m a little disconcerted without the reassurance of a flashing hard drive light, especially with long installs. ?Is there something that can reveal HDD activity onscreen, e.g. in the system tray?
Answer: You can try HDDPerf, which is dedicated to showing more details about the moments when the HDD is heavily used.
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DiskMon from Sysinternals can also be minimized to systray and act like a replacement HDD activity light.
DiskMon and HDDPerf are both freeware.