Unfortunately the drives I use are internal and my current tower doesn't have a separate indicator light for the drives.

That's strange. I wouldn't buy a tower that did have a hard drive indicator light.

I'm guessing that your renders are not waiting for your disks... they are waiting for your CPU so adding an SSD would be a waste of money.

~jr

@ Maverick

There are software based drive usage indicators.

I use 'Drive Meter' as widget on my W7 Ultimate.
It gives you a graphical timeline as well as kb/s usage speed etc.

And I use 'Network Meter' widget to monitor the network activity, because the handy little blinking network icon which XP had is gone in W7.

There are more lighter software out there that for example just blinks on your taskbar, you can search them with keywords like Hard Disk Indicator or HDD monitor software.

They work nicely and I have had no issues with them.
But as with any software, use them at your own risk.

BTW I do have a HDD LED on my PC.
Something that really made wonder was the reason why it blinked every second, just like a clock.

It seems that it is something that W7 does when the CD/DVD drives are empty.
It checks for discs every second, it's some kind of auto-run function. Disabling it doesn't seem to be an option.

My Gigabyte older boards with XP did that and still do. Don't know why.
JJK

In Win7, you can use the Resource Monitor (button can be found at the bottom of Task Manager) to determine disk usage during renders. :)

The best drive activity indicator software that I have found is "FloatLED", it's great.

http://www.stone-oakvalley-studios.com/floatled_index.php

Drive activity lights/indicators are not a good means to determine if your machine is disk-bound vs. CPU-bound.

The proper tooling is built into Windows, and is called "Performance Monitor".

Type "perfmon.exe" into the Start Menu search/run box (or locate it in Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Performance Monitor).

Select the "Performance Monitor" item under "Monitoring Tools" (Windows 7). You should see a real-time graph. By default, the only measured metric is "% Processor Time" (% CPU Busy).

Here's what PerfMon looks like:
http://williamsitblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/snaghtmld73c7e6_thumb.png

Click the "+" (add) icon to add a new "Counter" (anything that can be measured by Performance Monitor is called a 'Counter'.) Scroll down the list to find "Physical Disk".

Under "Physical Disk" are a dozen or so counters. The best (most basic) counter is "% Idle Time". Another is "Average Disk Queue Length" You can also choose which physical disks to monitor (by drive letter). Do not choose "TOTAL" as you want to measure individual disks. Choose one or more drive letters to monitor (Ctrl-click to select).

Now, just run the task you want to analyze (rendering video), and watch the graph!

You can also display network speed and a ZILLION other 'Counters' in PerfMon. Don't turn on more than a few at a time or your screen will look like this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/08/perfmon-gone-wild.html