Finally got my system switched over to one new 120Gb SATA drive (from two ratty old 20Gb IDE drives) and I've noticed something odd: My HDD activity light seems to be staying on all the time now, even when I'm pretty sure no HDD activity is taking place... this is especially noticable because I've modded a superbright red LED onto the HDD ACT line! Has my modded HDD light screwed up, or is this some SATA thing nobody warned me about? First SATA drive I've owned, so I'm back in noob territory (again...)
SATA drives generally dont affect the HDD activity light at all... (mine never comes on). so either your mod has defaulted to a constantly on signal (as the SATA drive doesnt give and signals) or it has screwed up...
Seems to depend on the motherboard (or the SATA chipset), my old MSI board wouldn't flash the Hd light for the onboard ports, only for the two extra ones on the silicon image chip. My nForce 3 board will flash for any HD that's plugged into it (except I've not tried a PATA drive on it yet...)
Interesting. The other thing that could well be affecting it is that I've now got both my CDROM & my CD/DVD/RW drives on the ATA133 cable rather than the "real" optical drive cable. Could one or both of the optical drives be sending a constant busy signal to the mobo? See my .sig for the mobo in question; I'm using the onboard SATA port for the new HDD. I'll probably pop the front off my case this weekend for other work, so I'll check the HDD mod circuitry while I'm at it...
