LED Isolator
A while ago, I posted a design for a home-made circuit designed to connect multiple hard drive add-on cards (and the motherboard) to a single case LED. I made a handful of these for the servers around here, and in the three years or so since then, I’ve yet to see anything similar. It’s possible that nobody but me actually cares if their case light reflects drive activity across all their drives — then again, it’s also possible that the people who actually cared simply made their own.
On the off chance that anybody wants one, I went to the trouble of making some professional-looking boards. More detail is available here.
Hi mate. i need a device making if you can. will pay of curse. i need a device that i can plug a sata cable (harddrive) into then from the device plug in to my motherboard ( basically joining 2 sata cables together to make one long sata cable. also on this extension device i need it to have a hdd activity led built into it so i can monitor the harddrive that is plugged into the extension device. can this be done? i need at least 2 of these devices building and possibly more email us if you can on birkett23@gmail.com cheers pete
It’s certainly possible, but unlike a parallel IDE cable, where the drive activity is on a separate pair, there is no activity on the cable.
Of course, the simplest thing to do is to is to simply extend a pair from the controller. Or even extend a pair from the drive. If this is impractical for some reason, then it’s complex, but possible, using LVDS receiver chips. Unless it’s worth $100 or so per device, I can’t imagine it’s worth it.