Many people now assemble their own NAS, such as Black Synology and Black QNAP. One big issue is that these types of NAS generally cannot change the brightness of the hard drive LED indicators through the system. As the demand for multi-drive NAS increases, the light pollution from these LEDs becomes more apparent, especially at night. Even if you cover them with light-blocking strips, the brightness can still be quite bothersome.
My NAS is also like this, with a Fractal Design case and 8 mechanical hard drives from Black QNAP. There are too many electrical devices in the living room, so I really wanted to remove the lights. After some research, I found a simple solution to this problem.
First, let's talk about the principle. The hard drive lights of the NAS are actually on the backplane and are illuminated by a light source through a light guide (said to be based on the principle of refraction), causing the two lights on the front panel of the chassis's hard drive bay (power light and activity light) to emit light (as shown in the image below, Image 1 is borrowed).
Specifically, the hard drive bay in my case looks like this:
Knowing the principle, it's easy to solve the problem. Other types of cases are similar, mainly finding the two transparent plastic light guides. To completely turn off the lights, just cover the top of the light guides. I used black electrical tape. If you only want to dim the lights, you can use other methods, such as using a permanent marker to darken them.
After covering them, it looks like this:
Alright, let's plug in the hard drives and see the effect. The lights should no longer be able to turn on.