On Friday, July 13, 2012 2:04:36 PM UTC-3, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Thu, 12 Jul 2012 22:49:29 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

>My goal is to put such large LEDs as HDD activity indicators on my PCs and external hard drives.

I presume that there's some reason the indicator needs to be so large..
Personally, I find the flashing lights to be somewhat of a
distraction, especially at night. The blue LED's are the worst. I
have partly covered the blue LED's on my Dell Opti 960 and DirecTV DVR
to prevent being blinded at night.

Whatever floats your boat Jeff. I respect your dislike of leds. But LEDs had a purpose: to give a visual clue about what is going on with a certain system component. So if the software had an unexpected pause but you saw a LED blinking on the CD-Reader you said to yourself "ok, it' s reading data from the CD". Or, coversely, when there was a pause in software or you started a disk-intensive operation you could look at a PC and say "oh, it' s doing disk I/O still".

Plus, LEDs were easily viewable because Destkops were, as its name implied, on top of DESKS, so just by looking at the side of the monitor, there usually was the PC with its HDD actvity LEDs.

Nowadays, my PC is a mid-tower server tucked under the desk. So while the MOBO still provides a "HDD activity" led, it' s about 5 inches from the floor level and at such angle that I'd have to lay on the floor to see it. That's when this idea of installing large LEDs on top of the case started, as I remembered I never had a problem seeing disk activity on either my 1571 FDDs or my Commodore Amiga....

If you still think this is a silly idea, consider why people write SOFTWARE to simulate the HDD led blinks on screen widgets or using the keyboard LEDs...

How to move your HDD leds to some more visible position using keyboard LEDs
http://www.instantfundas.com/2008/10...into-more.html

Windows HDD systray indicator
http://sourceforge.net/projects/activityindicat/

However, since I run several different OSs, I' d like my "solution" to be hardware, not software based...

I hope you get the idea by now...
FC