Constant Disk activity RN104 w/6.1.8

There are several standards. On some USB disk you will find a similar working design, the led representing both power and activity. You also have models that have only one led but with colour changing (E.G blue=on, red=activity).
I am for standards, that said I don't think that the LED thing is a standard, merely a habit. A standard is meant for compatibility, here that's not the case. I remember times where PC were in plastic cases with only ports on the rear side and green leds. Now we have metal cases with a glass to see inside, lights everywhere, main ports on the front and blue leds. Nobody cared, and some improvements like this were actually useful, like the fact that my Antec P182SE has the power supply at the bottom, it first created problems with cable lengths, but it helped a lot for heat management afterwards.

Microsoft now ships xbox one without kinect, so kinect games won't be developed as intensively as they should have been. I would love to see good kinect games, but with that decision (which was made for Microsoft by folks that refused innovation), I'm not likely to see an hybrid game nor a kinect FPS (remember time crisis 2 in arcade ? I'm pretty sure we can do that with kinect).
There is always room to negotiate things and people just tend to accept or refuse, for kinect, a free game (in addition to xbox fitness) or a 1year gold membership or a 2 years warranty extension would have solved the cost issue (and could have been done retroactively for early adopters). We could even imagine that microsoft could have negotiated with health insurance (or state/country to skip sales tax), you get a(n optional) discount on the console (or health insurance fees) but you have to play a kinect game for 2h a week (WHO recommendation) for a year (with a start bonus of 10H to make up for holidays), if you don't get your quota the console enters in limited functionality, preventing non-kinect game launch for exemple. After a year quota checking is disabled.
Or a kindle-like model, you get a 30second ad on each boot and each game launch but you get a discount on the console.

I agree that, here, it's mainly cosmetic and comes down to preferences (unless it impacts the LED's life expectancy), but I think it's best to let manufacturers do their things the way they want unless it's clearly impairing the usage, in which case nobody would buy. I believe that innovation begins with creative freedom, if people keep asking for things to look the way they always did, I don't think we will get innovation. As long as it is properly documented I don't see any problem. Maybe they are planning some cheap one bay NAS with only that led ? Not sure how EDA-500 works either, maybe it uses the same system ? Or maybe those leds tend to fail and this is easier to detect it that way ?
Of course if this is because an engineer just thought, "hey it's fun !", an option in OS6 would be welcomed, but I don't think they did this without an idea in the back of their head.