I blame federation delays.

Would electro magnetic radiation erase it before spaghettification?

This is the way

They sell travel sized rolls of that gorilla tape.

It sticks to just about anything, pretty much forever, and is totally opaque.

Should work like a charm.

Have a friend stand in front of it

This is the way.

Gordon Freeman?

A big-ass hammer.

Everything Black

That was still i was reffering to. I am still kinda scared to solder in there. Fault in the connector circuit may also end ir

I mean messing with circuitry around a hard drive can also be problematic

Huh!, just Disconnect the drive from power source and it will OFF.

Painters tape and a sharpie. Layered.

-Autist with severe light sensitivity

Any colour I should be using?

Duct tape

Probably no one's thought of this yet, but i'm going to say black electrical tape. If you put it over your eyes it takes care of all your devices at once.

Don't need to open the case. Hold the soldering iron on the light until light goes out.

Masking take and permanent marker or pen works too if you don't have electical tape.

I couldn't not.

You could not not?

They were hours apart, though.

Brown electrical tape, if you don't have black electrical tape.

No, that's right.

A true man of culture, I see 🫡

based on the other comments here i had to double check if this thread was in !shittyasklemmy@lemmy.ml smh my head

Activity lights are useful

in even more ways than one might think.

(see also this and this later work from the same author...)

Just empty the blinker led fluid.

Not really. You're not messing with the hard drive itself at all. A hard drive is a sealed component. Unless you're taking an extremely strong magnet near it, dripping it, or trying to directly inject power to the pins on the drive, there is no risk of damaging it.

You're messing with the plastic shell and maybe a small board that handles low power conversion and the LED. These are very simple things.

The only right answer. Works really well every time.

If they don't find ya handsome, they should find you handy.

Electrical

For an actual answer, it looks like WD has something called wdckit that is available on request.

I see a corresponding AUR entry that looks like it's grabbing some zip from a personal Russian CDN. Super sketchy looking tbh.

But it's possible this tool has whatever functionality the windows WD Utility uses to toggle the light in the drive's firmware.

IMO, it's not worth it. I'd just go the electrical tape route and maybe ask WD Customer Support if there's a way, and if not, ask that they support Linux better in the future.

Arch users dont have friends

This, is the way.

What about pliestocene?

Open it up and desolder the led?

A big ass-hammer

I'm partial to clear.

You have gold hydride-dideuteride? Lucky!

Matte black nail polish....works there and on annoying Bluetooth lights

I was trying to contribute some other options since the entire thread is like 50 people saying "some electrical tape will fix it" 😅

Perfect answer, no need for me to scroll further.

Black electrical tape, work better than any software

My favourite answer

Close your eyes

The age old solution of TAPE.

Wow this is the exact perfect example of why someone should install from AUR as less as possible, manually checking the pkgbuild and not just "yay yolo"

In this case the archive seems to be clean and be what wd would send if contacted, (even Windows versions are in the zip)

Btw WTF WD. Why making a tool and its documentation only available on request?? It is nothing special, more or less do the same stuff that the GUI can do (show details, send erase command, send ATA password command).

It doesn't seem to be able to disable the activity LED

I'd recommend an strip of paper or plastic, ideally with adhesive on one side. Ideally a dark color, like black.