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Reading the LED Bar

Each displayed drive has two activity indicators and a label.

IndicatorMeaning
GreenWindows reports data being read from the drive.
RedWindows reports data being written to the drive.
Both activeReads and writes are being reported during the sampling period.
Dim indicatorsLittle or no recent activity is being reported.

The brightness changes with activity and fades after a burst, making brief accesses easier to see. Sampling occurs repeatedly, so the bar is an activity indicator rather than an exact record of every individual operation.

Hover over a drive to see its identifying information. The display shows logical drives, which can be partitions on the same physical device.

What the lights do not tell you

Red means writing; it is not an error light. DriveLED does not identify the process responsible for an access, diagnose SMART health or estimate remaining SSD life. A dim LED does not prove that a drive is disconnected: the drive may simply be idle, or Windows may not expose its activity counters.

For process and file-level write analysis, see the O&O VisualDisk tool supplied with O&O Defrag.