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HDD individual led indicators?

B

Ben83red

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 20, 2005
Messages
78
Ok, currently I have 4 internal sata drives. And on all PCs there is one light that just says if one of the drives is in use. I would like to mod it so I can get 4 lights indicators on the front of my case one for each hd, so i can see which one exactly is in use. Is this possible through the motherboard (I doubt it.)
In which case:

I was thinking of using a sata enclosure (sata internal drive fits in, with a sata external connector (not esata), ripping the board out of the enclosure. Rerouting the indicator led to the front, bypassing the boards power and connecting it to the computers psu.

So basically:
PSU
.|
V
HDD -> Control board -> SATA cable -> MB header
.................|
................+----> HDD indicator led to front of case


Would that work? Or would I still have to supply power to the control board?
 
I don't think this is possible unless you have a dedicated sata controller board for each drive. Any drives that share a controller board will also share the hdd activity led.
 
I think there was a change in the SATA spec to use one of the pins on the power connector as an activity indicator, but I could very well be confused or just plain wrong. Let me see if I can dig that up again.
 
widefault said:
I think there was a change in the SATA spec to use one of the pins on the power connector as an activity indicator, but I could very well be confused or just plain wrong. Let me see if I can dig that up again.
Click to expand...

I remember the one you are referring to, but that was either optional or not implemented. Either way, it's not the way most consumer controllers or drives are wired. Some hot-swap raid type controllers may offer this functionality.

Kind of a shame really, I've also desired the same idea. Seems like if there's a market big enough to develop drives with see through windows, a 10 cent led jack wouldn't be the end of the world.
 
Yeah, went looking and the pin I thought was being used is now used for staggered spinup.

Wish drives still had pins for the LED onboard, but I haven't seen those on a non-SCSI drive since the days of 1GB drives. At least on IDE you can still get the signal off the cable.
 
Thanks for the responses.

What I ment was I would grab 4 external enclosures and rip the control boards out of em and use one per harddrive. I would use SATA - SATA enclosures so I don't suffer too large of a bandwidth hit as I would with usb or firewire. Another thing is I assume I would have to power the control boards, could i wire them up with molex connectors and use the 12v rail off of the powersupply or would i have to use the wallwarts/powerbricks that come with the enclosures?
 
It depends on what kind of voltage the boards get from the wall warts. Check what voltage the boards take (it'll be printed on the label or embossed in the case somewhere). If it's higher than 12V, it'll be regulated down on the board somewhere. It's at that point that you'd apply power from the PSU.
 
Ben83red said:
What I ment was I would grab 4 external enclosures and rip the control boards out of em and use one per harddrive. I would use SATA - SATA enclosures so I don't suffer too large of a bandwidth hit as I would with usb or firewire.
Click to expand...
This seems a rather complicated scheme that's going to loose some bandwidth somewhere just to get leds... But if that's what floats your boat...

Also, I haven't used extrenal sata gear, but it seems to me that for gear using a sata interface, the controller still resides in the pc... what's in the external box is a 'dumb' board juts to connect to the drive... So you'd be back at square one.
 
Well all I need is the dumb board (all I really want is a dumbboard) all the board needs to do is detect if the drive is being accessed and light up a led.
 
Ben83red said:
Well all I need is the dumb board (all I really want is a dumbboard) all the board needs to do is detect if the drive is being accessed and light up a led.
Click to expand...

The reason I call it a dumb board is because it has no logic on it... it's just like a jack adapter.

So it cannot detect anything. So it cannot light an led.

Now usb or firewire, that's another story.
 
Hmm ... How bout getting a good look at pics on newegg of of add on SATA or SATA+RAID controllers.
The old FastTrack IDE RAID card I've gpt has two activity LED leads. I use em plus the on board to give me three case LEDs. Though I'm talking about old school stuff here, so there's a good chance today's boards don't have LED leads since most cases only have one HD LED.
 
In order to accomplish this, I do think you'd need some type of multi channel controller card (that would typically be a RAID card). But I think the low end cards don't offer individual led status... they tend to still be combined. Better cards probably do, but the price goes up quickly once you get beyond simple controllers.
 
If your system is windows based and you still have a Parallel port or Parallel port adapter card you could wire up some LEDs to the output of the Parallel port and use a small app in Windows to trigger them when the specific hard drives read or write.
 
My Seagate ST-225 all had Green LEDs in front!!!!

A lot of you kids were still in diapers back then!
 
brilliant idea mjrstryker, but who about that small windows app, can you help us out a bit here, some sample code maybe - sorry to be such hight maintenance.

thanks, chris
 
Well for WindowsXP there's another small app you need to install first that gives you direct read/write access to the Parallel Port. For earlier versions of Windows you can use the API to call the LPT Port and read/write values.

Here's a free app that will give you access to the Parallel port.
http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm

I don't know enough about WMI to give you a code example at the moment, but I believe the easiest way would be to access the WMI PerformanceCounters for Reads per second and Writes per second and base your LEDs off of that.

There's also a program called hddled that will simulate Hard Drive Activity LEDs on your desktop and the registered version is supposed to come with an ActiveX component for it, though I can't testify to that for sure.
 
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