I am on Arch Linux and I want to disable this activity indicator light on a WD hard drive. I know there is a software on Windows for doing that, but since I am on Linux, how could I do it? This light is annoying when I am in a dark room.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    18 days ago

    I’m guessing you formatted the drive? Most of them are NTFS by default.

    When I switched to Mac, my Mac wouldn’t even read the drive, due to the enclosure being Windows-specific (to be fair, it said so on the box; they’ve since expanded). So I shucked the drive, put it in a custom enclosure… and paid $10 for a program that lets me R/W to NTFS on macOS.

    I can’t remember if it had a light.

    Oddly, the new enclosure also uses USB-B. Hate that damn port. I have a hub that uses it, too. Fun fact: that port is the reason for Lightning existing. Apple was (and is) on the USB committee or whatever it was, but when they saw USB-B, they (quite rightly) said hell no and went to Intel to develop Lightning. They wanted something that they could roll with for ten years. USB-B was used in a handful of phones for like one generation (Galaxy S5/Note 4) and then it was USB-C. If the USB committee had jumped straight to USB-C, Lightning never would have happened. In case you needed another reason to hate that connector.