Hard drive activity light

[rankar7]

Does anyone know how to rig up hard drive activity lights for each IDE hard drive?

I have four hard drives in my system and it would be nice to know which one is actually in use.

Buehler? Anyone??

[A1 Web]

this is EXACTLY what you need .... and the price is right too ... (FREE!!) :cool:

http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodl/index.html

I have 3 local hard drives, and 2 network drives, and I monitor ALL of them from a little corner of my monitor

[Peter M]

There is only one possible activity light for each IDE _channel_. This is because a master/slave setup runs on only one controller unit (the one in the Master drive).

[rankar7]

I did some research and thanks guys. I see that you can only have one activity light for each IDE channel. I was able to rig up an op-amp circuit to have two HDD activity lights, I'm going to test that circuit shortly.

To have true HDD activity lights for all my four drives, the next step would be to have a four channel-IDE controller with this op-amp circuit for all channels.

[A1 Web]

So you never looked at the link I gave you ?? :(

I have READ and WRITE LEDs for each drive whether local or network ...

[sm8000]

Sounds like he wants hardware, not software.

Is there even such a thing as a 4-channel IDE controller?

[rankar7]

A1, sorry if I wasn't clear with my thank-yous... I did try out that link and it's actually pretty cool but I guess sm8000 is right: I would prefer a hardware solution (nothing beats a lot of blinky LEDs).

And yes, you can get an 4-channel IDE, in fact you can get an 8-channel IDE. Promise, I believe, sells a 4 and 8 port IDE RAID card (you don't have to configure it as a "RAID", but rather JBOD for just a bunch of drives).

This will allow you to slap up to 8 drives together all under one logical drive.

[A1 Web]

Ahh .. kewl
I did not know 4 and 8 channel IDE cards were available.

:)