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I have an old Apple server, which I am working on turning into my new storage server. I have ripped everything out, since everything was locked down to Apple firmware, so only the chassis remains.

For this project I would like to reuse the Apple HDD trays, which all have two LED's. My understanding of servers is, that one LED shows that a HDD is present and the other shows the drive activity. To get the present LED to glow, I simply added an LED with resistor between the 5V PWR and GND for the HDD.

But my problem lies in getting the activity LED to work. I tried to add an LED and resistor between the data wires and GND wires, but with no success.

So does anyone know, how I should go about adding a drive activity LED for each drive?

Giacomo1968
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mriisa
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1 Answers1

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Separate LED activity lights for each HDD caddy are often just custom for the server's motherboard/hba connections - See HPE servers with their 4 spinning LEDs for example. There are some options when building your own though:

  • Some raid controllers can have multiple LED activity headers, and that's what drives separate LEDs on most smaller devices.
  • Some HDDs have their own header for activity LEDs that look like jumper pins, but it's more common on SCSI drives than SATA.
  • SATA power pin 11 provides a device activity signal (DAS) for this purpose, but it's not exactly simple to use for powering an LED. It's also disabled by default in some SATA versions
Cpt.Whale
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