Make your HDD blink

If you are like me and have a server with a bunch of disks running at home you might have had the need to identify one of the at times. Perhaps it started reporting errors or you wanted to replace it with a larger disk.

I have seen multiple programs to make your HDD’s led blink, but since I already had smartmontools installed I noticed I could make it happen using smartctl.

This small shell script enables you to make a given HDD’s led blink. Name it hddblink or something.

#!/bin/sh
while true; do sudo smartctl -a $1 > /dev/null 2>&1; echo -n "."; sleep 1; done

Now you can use hddblink /dev/sdd for instance to make the led of that drive flash on and off.