Hard drive activity light?

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Hard drive activity light?

First and foremost, heyyyyy again to all my long-lost Applefritter buddies!!! God I missed you guys Smile I was cut off from the mac-hacking civilization for some time due to complexities arising from various college crap, playing shows with my band and my miraculously finding a girlfriend who not only puts up with me but encourages all my late-night Mac and PC hacking. Smile So hey, it's great to be back, missed you guys Smile

I've been lurking around here for some time - (by the way, love the ongoing drama w/ Steve Landon and all, very exciting... and the p-p-powerbook thread was freaking HILARIOUS) and I've been looking for an excuse to get back in the game. Well, here it is.

I recently changed out the hard drives in my 1.33GHz G4. Nothing bad, just needed more storage. So now that my system is purring on twin 120 gig seagates, I have these two 60 gig maxtors sitting here... and that got me thinking... I really want to get a few more drives and set up a large firewire RAID array, similiar to the one that - who was it - I think it was Dr. Bob? Made a while ago. I'm pretty sure that I want to do the case out of acrylic- I had such a blast last time working on the Gossamer Cubed hack that I'd def like to do that again if I can. Sooooo with making my own case in mind again, here's the problem...

How would one go about tapping off an IDE hard drive and producing some kind of drive activity light? Is there a particular wire in the IDE ribbon cable that you can connect an LED to? Or is it more complicated than that? I seem to remember somebody hacking a G4 to have the apple at the top light up whenever the HD was accessed, but I'm not sure. I don't really want to throw into this project without the ability to monitor the activity of each individual drive... So yeah, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks again Applefritterers!

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It was Dr. Bob... http://v

It was Dr. Bob...

http://vader.inow.com/~drbob/fwcase.html

As for the activity light... isn't there a pin on the IDE bus that does that?

TOM

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Re: It was Dr. Bob...http://v

As for the activity light... isn't there a pin on the IDE bus that does that?

The firewire controllers I used had outputs that I used.

You can take the signal from the IDE bus but you can't take the power from the bus. You'll need a transistor to power the LED instead.

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Activity

I would think the easiest thing to d would to use a controller board that had output for HD activity allready on it.

ken_the_stp's picture
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witch pin IDE pins have the signal

witch ide pins have that signal is it at all posable to get the signal for transmit and receive. or even perhaps get a separate signal for each ide device.

Thanks

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