Sata HDD activity LED mod?

[warup89]

Every time you see a representation of the brain's nerves sending signals to each other, you see like a little wires lighting up.

So i thought about applying this to my case by having small LEDs running along each sata cable for each of my 4 HDDs, and lighting up every time there's HDD activity.

Now i just gotta figure out where to get such LEDs and mainly, find the LED activity connectors for the sata HDDs?

 

[mavalpha]

You can't do it for every HD separately, the best you can do is the case LED header on the motherboard. I'd also think it'll blank so fast that you won't actually notice the blinking anyway, just a steady light of varying brightness.

 

[E.T]

You can't do it for every HD separately

Except with hardware RAID controllers.

Some counter circuit could be used for making illuminated LED to move.

 

[warup89]

You can't do it for every HD separately, the best you can do is the case LED header on the motherboard. I'd also think it'll blank so fast that you won't actually notice the blinking anyway, just a steady light of varying brightness.

Yeah i was considering that as my last option since its the easiest. Dimming lights would still looks pretty nice too.

Except with hardware RAID controllers.

Some counter circuit could be used for making illuminated LED to move.

I was just looking at that but it would be a really expensive option.


-I thought each sata HDD had its own activity signal connector like the old IDE hdd's?

 

[E.T]

There's never been any actual activity indicator output in HDDs except maybe some some wire in data cable.

SATA data cable is just that with ground contacts around and separating two differential signaling wire pairs.
But power connector has one pin reserved for such use. Check chapter 6.4
http://bj.soulinfo.com/~hugang/fpga/bus/SATA__2.5_Gold.pdf
If device supports that it would still need some adapter between cable and drive for getting that signal out.