where did the lights on usb flash drives go?

This may be a small thing, but it was mighty convenient.

Flash drives. Tons of them are out there. Easy, cheap data storage, except something is missing that they had before...

...an indicator light.

It used to be that nearly every single flash drive had a small LED light on it. The old SanDisk cruzer used to have a rather large orange light that was quite nice. When it was in use, quicker blinking. When idling, the light faded in and out slowly.

The USB 2.0 versions of the SanDisk cruzer Glide had a smaller red indicator light on them. Again, same as the orange where fast blinking indicated data transfer and slower fade-in/out indicated idling.

The best flash drive light indicator ever - even if it was slightly annoying sometimes - were certain versions of the SanDisk cruzer mini. The LED was a bright blue that looked like a mod but it wasn't, blinking rapidly for every bit of data transferring in or out. Also, the placement of the light was right on the end so there was no way you could miss it. It was fantastic.

The lights need to come back

If you go all the way back to the earliest PCs, they all had drive indicator lights. Even on PCs without hard drives, the floppy drive(s) had an indicator light. For hard drives, that light was always red in color, and it absolutely had to be there so you know whenever any drive activity was going on. It sucked whenever you didn't have that light.

On other drives, same thing. CD-ROM or DVD drive, Zip drive (remember those?), or whatever it was, they all had activity indicator lights.

To make it perfectly clear: AN ON-SCREEN PROGRESS BAR IS NOT A SUITABLE REPLACEMENT FOR AN ACTIVITY LIGHT. Why? If you have an app or program in front, guess what? You can't see that activity going on with physical storage media in the background.

On-screen progress bars are most useful for things NOT local to your computer (such as loading progress). But for local storage media, yes, a light is needed to show activity. This is especially true for large file transfers. If anything, you need that light to let you know when the file transfer is DONE.

Want lights? You have to go old.

The SanDisk cruzer Glide USB 2.0 has an indicator light on it, and does have 256GB versions available. It's an old model, but you can still get it new and sealed at the time I write this.

Yes, USB 2.0 is slow, but if you want that indicator light, that's what you have to get.

And no, the USB 3.0 version of this does not have the light, even though it looks identical to the 2.0 version.

Published 2025 Mar 6