Light Pollution — The Nerd Version

I recently bought a Vantec SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure and put a WD Caviar Black hard drive in it. So far its been excellent. I bought it for recording video game footage with FRAPS, and CrystalDiskMark puts the sequential write speed at 127mb/s—good enough for me.

But what is with the explosion of lights on every piece of computer hardware these days? It isn’t enough that the Vantec enclosure as a power or status light, but instead it has a blue LED that runs the entire length of the case.
Vantec is very proud of the light. According to the manual that came with the enclosure, its specifications include (emphasis added),

Attractive Blue LED Indicates Power & HDD Activity

Really? Hey baby, what’s an attractive LED like you doing in a place like this?

Anyway, I hate the proliferation of lights. At least give the end user the option to turn them off and on without having to turn the device itself off and on. Vantec includes a physical fan control, presumably for folks who don’t want the additional noise from the fan, so why not a physical LED control?

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