Splitting HD activity LED to two controllers?

[mikestjames]

I have two SATA drives on the MB controller (that's all it supports) and I am adding a PCI SATA controller card to support two additional drives.

Q: Can I split the HD activity LED by splicing additional leads so that it will show activity from all four drives? The SATA card I bought has HD activity LED output pins.

It SOUNDS OK to me, but I don't want to burn anything up!

If this isn't a good idea, I guess I will use the POWER LED for the add-in controller card...you can hear my machine running from across the street, so a power LED is redundant.

I'm junking my ADAPTEC 2940U2w SCSI card and the two 18gb LVD drives attached to it. Something about my new MB (Gigabyte K8 Triton) makes it s-l-o-o-o-w. Maybe the NForce 3 chipset and the Adaptec card don't get along. Anyway, those two LVD drives that were blinding fast on my old A7V333 are the slowest drives in the system now, so out they go. I digress. Sorry.

Thanks for any input on the LED thing.

 

[Leros]

You should build yourself some sort of HDD activity baybus. Maybe you can buy these?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Electrically speaking, you would be fine if you rigged them in parallel, as you would be keeping the voltage the same, and your current would compensate, thus keeping the 3.5-5v required for the LED to operate. If you figure out where to connect the wires to on the hard drives, let me know, because I have 13 places for lights on my case. Never could figure out how to rig them for each hd.
Tas.

 

[CrispyFried]

To do the power led mod and your sata card has standard headers you should be good to go, my Antec 1080 has 4 leds in front, power, ide HD, sata HD and network. Just run the cables.

But you can combine them too, just run them as tasburrfoot78362 says.

tasburrfoot78362: Some HDs have the pins should look just like a jumper. Many of my older HDs have those. Some HDs have their own leds, just solder to that.

ThisHere is some info on IDE signals and how to pull the led status from them, it in a link I posted there

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Awesome. Looks like I'll have something else to mess with... Thanks.
Tas.