Monitor a Laptop's Drive Activity via a Virtual LED

Activity Indicator lets you keep an eye on your hard disk’s activities.
CALL ME OLD-FASHIONED, but I like to know when my hard drive is active.
That's partly so I know when Windows finishes booting, and partly so I can troubleshoot.
In the old days, I could hear a drive thrashing inside my desktop PC. But now that I work mostly on laptops, which incorporate much quieter drives (or, in the case of solid- state drives, silent drives), I have to rely on LEDs.Just one problem: Like many newer lap­tops, my Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook has no LED at all.
Happily, I found Activity Indi­cator. This utility adds a drive-activity "LED” to Windows' system tray so that you can keep tabs on a drive’s read/write status.
Activity Indicator not only
provides basic drive info (total space, space consumed, and so on), but it can also save a cus­tomizable log of all disk activi­ty. In fact, you can review that log right inside the program's settings window, saving it to a file only when you need to.
You can choose from 18 icon sets to show drive activity and inactivity—from an LED-like rectangle to a Geiger counter­style meter. You can even con­figure the “LED” to interact with actual keyboard LEDs (if your system has them), light­ing up, say, the <Num Lock> key whenever the drive is active. When I tried to do so on my Samsung, however, pairing it with the <Caps Lock> key, it triggered the actual Caps Lock function every time the drive jumped into action. (I had to disable that option, natch.)
To make the most of Activi­ty Indicator, you need to do two things. First, modify your system tray so that the indi­cator stays visible at all times. (Set it to Show icon and notifi­cations.) Second, because the utility lacks a "run at startup”
option, you must either load it manually each time you start Windows or add it to your Startup folder.
Even with that minor annoy­ance, however, Activity Indica­tor is a very useful little prob­lem solver.