hard drive lights

dilbert firestorm wrote:

if you (newbies) don't know what they are, they are a removable plastic
part that you remove from the external drive bays of a computer case
when you add in a DVD drive or floppy drive for example. it comes in 2
versions, 5.25" & 3.5" plates or pans.

Nothing prevents you from making stuff.

When I need to place cooling fans in strange
places, I make my own adapters. For example,
I had a piece of board sitting in one
5.25" tray, with a fan mounted near the
end of the board, and put there to
cool a part of the motherboard.

I also mount 80mm fans next to fanless
video cards, to keep the video card stable.
I had a fanless FX5200 that used to crash,
until I added cooling to it. I make a bracket
which bolts to the PCI slot covers. to hold up
the fan.

If you want to make "tray toys", start with
a 5.25" rail kit, and bolt stuff to it. Make
a frame. Bolt sheet aluminum to it. You can
drill holes in the aluminum for your LED
grommets or retainer rings. You can cut
square holes with a nibbling tool (Radio
Shack used to sell them). To use the nibbling
tool, you drill a pilot hole first, shove
the nibbling tool head through the
hole and start nibbling bits of metal off
until you have a larger square hole.

I used to do that with Hammond boxes,
many eons ago. I had at least one summer
job, that consisted of nothing but building
electronics projects into Hammond boxes.
So a little nibbling work doesn't scare me :-)
I'm used to it.

Paul

On 2015-07-31 09:34, dilbert firestorm wrote:

interesting software solution.
but its hardware solution I'm looking for.

Some hard drives have am activity LED built-in; if your drives have that
you can unsolder the LED and mount it on the case instead. I also used
to have ATA drive cages (i.e. hot swap'able) and they came with an
activity LED, maybe you can find SATA ones? (of course you'd have to put
all your hard drives in a 5.25 bay which has a slot on the front of your
case).

That Pin 11 that Paul mentioned looks interesting tho, if someone makes
use of that I'd appreciate it if they posted their efforts here. Having
a LED for each drive is cool, you can judge how good your setup is at
multiplexing I/O to the drives...

Best Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Member-+-David-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/Planetary-Society-+-
oO-( )-Oo "Let's get ... *Dangerous*!" -Darkwing