John, None of my Linux boxes with SATA drives (3 machines) show drive activity via the LED. It seems to be some limitation of the Linux drivers.
The SATA bus is a different hardware interface from the EIDE interface. My suspicion has been that the LED is hard wired into the EIDE controller and probably has to be driven by extra commands (somehow...) when using the SATA interface. Keep in mind that the EIDE controller is in your chipset and the Silicon Image SATA controller is a completely separate chip so what it's doing may or may not be visible to the hardware that drives the LED. Anyway, a bit long winded but you are not alone. ;-) Cheers, Mark On 8/19/05, John J. Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Good morning, > > Something that's been bothering me, although not that much, for about 3 > years now. I've never investigated, and perhaps the answer is simple, > but every distro I've used (RH9, FC1, FC2, Suse 9.1, and now Gentoo), > has not shown the tiny blinking drive activity indicator on the front of > my tower. This machine has always, until a few weeks ago when I finally > dumped it for good, dual-booted with XP. And XP always showed activity > via the light when there was activity. I would have thought that this > was actually a hardware signal, and not OS related. But it doesn't > appear that way. This is with a WD 36GB SATA drive on a ASUS A7N8X > deluxe mobo w/ onboard Silicon Image controller. > > Any, and all, help is greatly appreciated. > > Thanks, > John > > -- > Contrary to the lie machine, the world is not safer. > > > -- [email protected] mailing list
