Independent IDE LED's on rounded Cables
Enak a Bit-Tech.net user was kind enough to write a helper on using rounded cables.
had
wanted to do this mod for a long time...
I have a Promise Fasttrak 100 TX2 controller, 4 Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40Gb
HDDs and 1 sodding LED to show it all off.
Thanks to ZapWizard
for showing how it can be done.
I won't go into the background of how this works as ZapWizard has covered pretty
much everything I will just start with the following notes:
1. If you are going to follow instructions follow them to the letter... Having
wired everything up it didn't work... I soon realised that the white wires in my
cable were signal and the coloured cables ground not the other way round as I
guessed... Of course if I followed the instructions in the first place and cut
the third wire in I wouldn't have had this problem at all 8)
2. Having wired it up correctly the drives weren't detected on boot up. I solved
this by setting the master drive jumpers to Master with non-ATA slave. I've
figured that the activity line is also used between drives on the same cable to
detect the presence of a slave... without this connection some drives will
assume they are on their own and cause the drives to not work.
Without further ado here is the mod:
First off I modded the cables cuting the wires for pin 39 and bringing them
out of the shieving.
Next I grabbed a piece of six core cable and soldered this onto one of the
molex connectors connection red and black to 5v and ground.
The remaining four cores were soldered onto the pin 39s for each drive with a
bit of heat shrink to make a tidy job.
The
usb ports I never used have been removed and I am using the plate to house the
extra LEDs. The white plastic is HIPS with 2.5mm holes for the LEDs to shine
through with a bit of blue filter.
The plate is screwed on and diffused blue LEDs glued into place. I connected
the LEDs to the wiring as per ZapWizards guide.
The independent activity gives a very pleasing effect.
Hope you like it... I do