Do the light bulbs on USB hard drives ever blow? The light on the front of my USB drive has gone out - drive works fine, though. I recently formatted it and replaced the FAT32 file system with NTFS - Just a little corcerned if I wore it out by doing that...

I always thought they were LEDs...

LEDs will eventually burn out, though they generally take a very long time to do so. Maybe your drive just had a bum LED, or it wiggled loose of its connection or something. I don't think I'd necessarily take it as a sign that the drive itself is going bad.

The particular drive is 7 years old - is that long enough?

Then again, the light is back on again... And it just keeps flashing. Could it be that NTFS is always 'busy' when compared with FAT32?

It's possible that NTFS and FAT haandle it differently, I guess. My windows never gave me the option to format my USB in NTFS so I wouldn't know.