IDE LED light for my P4P800VM and SATA hard drive?

I have a new P4P800VM w/ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive.
The IDE LED on the motherboard apparently only works
for the IDE devices (like my DVD-RW drive).

How do I get the IDE LED on the motherboard to work w/
my SATA drive so that the case light comes on when there
is hard drive activity?

Any help appreciated.

aj

Hi aj,
I have a newly built AMD64 system with on an Asus K8V SE DL board. HDrive is
a Seagate 160gb sata drive. I also have no led drive light. Not to worry go
to http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodl/index.html for a software
operated on screen hd light. Works fine. Apparently it depends on which chip
is controlling your sata. Promise or VIA. I'm on VIA so no go. Promise, if
you have it, probably will.
Information culled from this very ng. Thanks guys.
HTH
Dave.

"aj" wrote in message
...
I have a new P4P800VM w/ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive.
The IDE LED on the motherboard apparently only works
for the IDE devices (like my DVD-RW drive).

How do I get the IDE LED on the motherboard to work w/
my SATA drive so that the case light comes on when there
is hard drive activity?

Any help appreciated.

aj

In article , "Dave E"
wrote:

Hi aj,
I have a newly built AMD64 system with on an Asus K8V SE DL board. HDrive is
a Seagate 160gb sata drive. I also have no led drive light. Not to worry go
to http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodl/index.html for a software
operated on screen hd light. Works fine. Apparently it depends on which chip
is controlling your sata. Promise or VIA. I'm on VIA so no go. Promise, if
you have it, probably will.
Information culled from this very ng. Thanks guys.
HTH
Dave.

The LED situation is a mess, isn't it.

I've tried researching this a couple of times, and I'm still not
getting any practical answers. Your software "LED" may be the
best you can do.

On IDE drives, pin 39 seems to be an activity signal, which is
active low. It looks like the signals from the primary and secondary
are combined together, either with discrete logic (two input gate)
or via an interface on a Super I/O, to make a signal suitable for
driving the LED on the case. That seems to work on most motherboards.

Some IDE drives have a LED mounted on the controller board, and
all you would need to remote that, is a piece of large diameter
plastic fiber optic cable (sometimes used for dentistry).

For SATA, it appears the standards guys did something very funny.
The SATA native power connector is 15 pins. Pin 11 is marked in
the standard as "reserved", and somewhere (don't know where) I
read it might be used for an activity signal. Of course, in the
future, the SATA power cable will terminate on the power supply,
so getting at pin 11 will be impossible.

With drives that have dual powering (traditional 4 pin Molex
plus SATA 15 pin), you could connect a cable assembly to the
SATA power, to gain access to pin 11. This will require a
backplane style SATA connector, one which has the 15 pin power
and the data pins in the same connector. You would cut the
data section off with a hacksaw, leaving the 15 pin section to
interface to the drive. To see a typical part, try entering
87679-0001 in the Molex.com search box. Then, solder a wire to
pin 11. It is possible if there actually is an activity signal
on there, it will be active low and open collector. There might
not be enough drive capability to drive a LED directly, so some
kind of buffer might be in order (like a two input gate, for
example). You would have to be real motivated to waste time
experimenting with this route. As the design of most ordinary
power cabling makes access to this pin impossible, it is hard
to say whether drive manufacturers bother connecting an activity
signal to this pin or not.

Controller chips are another source of a potential activity
signal, but data sheets aren't always available for these.
On the Siliconimage.com website, I found an application note
for the 3112a, that says pin 68 is a GPIO pin that is
driven by the SATA code, to flash when there is activity. It
has 4ma drive capability, meaning a fairly dim LED output from
a 3.3V supply, or again, the use of a transistor to provide
enough current for an ordinary LED.

Start here, click "Product Support" near the bottom of the page...
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/sii3114.asp

takes you to this IP address:
http://12.24.47.40

Navigate to the 3112a section for the application note.

The implication of the SII3112a method, is again, manfacturers
don't really care whether you get a LED or not. These
features are added as an afterthought, and more than once I've
seen this stuff done with a GPIO pin and driver code to flash
the LED.

Due to the non-standard nature of providing the feature, it
is easy to see why it isn't implemented consistently on
motherboard designs. More of a kludge than anything else.

I think I've also looked at the datasheet for a SATA equipped
Southbridge, and there is no LED drive pin on that, either.

I know that some PCI controller cards have LED drive, like a
Promise IDE controller I've got. I connected a LED to the header
on the PCI card and have the LED mounted on my case.

Paul


"aj" wrote in message
...
I have a new P4P800VM w/ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive.
The IDE LED on the motherboard apparently only works
for the IDE devices (like my DVD-RW drive).

How do I get the IDE LED on the motherboard to work w/
my SATA drive so that the case light comes on when there
is hard drive activity?

Any help appreciated.

aj

Try reversing polarity of LED wires. My LED works fine on P4C800DLX with
Seagate SATA HD.

Dave, you must be right about this being controller-specific. I'm
running an A7V8X with a single Maxtor SATA drive and two optical
ATAPI/IDE drives, and the HD activity LED works fine when the Maxtor
is active. The MB uses a Promise combination RAID/SATA controller
(PDC 20376 I think).

Mark

"Dave E" wrote in message ...
Hi aj,
I have a newly built AMD64 system with on an Asus K8V SE DL board. HDrive is
a Seagate 160gb sata drive. I also have no led drive light. Not to worry go
to http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodl/index.html for a software
operated on screen hd light. Works fine. Apparently it depends on which chip
is controlling your sata. Promise or VIA. I'm on VIA so no go. Promise, if
you have it, probably will.
Information culled from this very ng. Thanks guys.
HTH
Dave.

"aj" wrote in message
...
I have a new P4P800VM w/ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive.
The IDE LED on the motherboard apparently only works
for the IDE devices (like my DVD-RW drive).

How do I get the IDE LED on the motherboard to work w/
my SATA drive so that the case light comes on when there
is hard drive activity?

Any help appreciated.

aj

You're right, same here on my K8V SE Deluxe. It's only the VIA SATA that
seems to be affected.
I'm surprised that they didn't take the opportunity to fix it when they
rewired the board to change the LAN chip etc on this one.
Also, I would have thought that a BIOS fix might be possible.
The fact that I see the LED work when the Promise controller operates tends
to rule out the backwards-LED theory unfortunately!

- Steve


"Mark" wrote in message
om...
Dave, you must be right about this being controller-specific. I'm
running an A7V8X with a single Maxtor SATA drive and two optical
ATAPI/IDE drives, and the HD activity LED works fine when the Maxtor
is active. The MB uses a Promise combination RAID/SATA controller
(PDC 20376 I think).

Mark

"Dave E" wrote in message
...
Hi aj,
I have a newly built AMD64 system with on an Asus K8V SE DL board.
HDrive is
a Seagate 160gb sata drive. I also have no led drive light. Not to worry
go
to http://www.oo-software.com/en/products/oodl/index.html for a software
operated on screen hd light. Works fine. Apparently it depends on which
chip
is controlling your sata. Promise or VIA. I'm on VIA so no go. Promise,
if
you have it, probably will.
Information culled from this very ng. Thanks guys.
HTH
Dave.

"aj" wrote in message
...
I have a new P4P800VM w/ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive.
The IDE LED on the motherboard apparently only works
for the IDE devices (like my DVD-RW drive).

How do I get the IDE LED on the motherboard to work w/
my SATA drive so that the case light comes on when there
is hard drive activity?

Any help appreciated.

aj

Hi All,
Hope as you say Steve that they can do something in the bios. This Seagate
is so damned quiet you can't hear it at all. It's 2am here and I've just
heared a sparrow breaking wind outside, it's that quiet. Well you get the
picture.
Swapping the led conns doesn't work. Not for me anyway. I may try the
Promise chip later this week. I've round fd and ide cables (cdrom) being
delivered soon, I might give the other chip a try.
See yall
Dave.

"aj" wrote in message
...
I have a new P4P800VM w/ Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive.
The IDE LED on the motherboard apparently only works
for the IDE devices (like my DVD-RW drive).

How do I get the IDE LED on the motherboard to work w/
my SATA drive so that the case light comes on when there
is hard drive activity?

Any help appreciated.

aj