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[produKtNZ]

Firstly, I'd like to thank Carl for his Patience & time with this project. I've no real electronics experience but Carl helped me in every way possible.
You're a Legend dude, cheers

I bought this server back in Oct '08 to use as a home fileserver.
 It was an ex Chinese Railways server and featured 2x1.3ghz Xeon's, 512MB Ram & 2 Cheetah 10k Scsi160 Drives.

I quickly added the 2610SA controller, and various other bits (like enough harddrives to last someone a lifetime lol)
And of course with adding HDD's to a raidcard presents a problem. There will be no LED's on the front of the case connected to the main storage drives. Well we can't have that! lol

The card has a SMD LED for each port. How to extract a signal\voltage to drive another led? I found this project http://www.hotsource.net/projects/main.php?cmd=album&var1=NAS/&var2=1
I Found that it has a remote LED output plug, But as this is a OEM card,
finding a remote led cable was nigh on impossible.

In comes Carl 

I had already purchased 5mm Blue LED's from Ledstuff on TradeMe by this point, so I asked Carl. He put me onto www.farnell.com.au and he linked me to the parts I needed after sending some photo's. So I topped up my Visa and went'a ordering =).

The parts arrived from Aus in 3 days (amazing).
From this point on, so that this post doesn't become as long as a piece of string - There will be a photo tour in ShockWave Flash. But first! I shall elaborate on the Various calamity's

The original idea was simply to drill 6 holes for the LED's driven off the 2610SA. After a lengthy conversation with my flatmate we decided it would be far cooler to do it in base2 binary representation.

*So then I set about drilling the holes. The first one row I borked. Then everything else was borked from that point because i didn't re-measure and re-measure again. I also didn't realize that i could have removed the front from the server, which when drilling would have made things a heap easier >_<

*Then I obviously had to cut out a square to mount the LED panel in. So i bought a diamond cutoff wheel for my dremel off TradeMe, which turned out to be c o m p l e t e l y useless, so I ordered reinforced cutoff wheels and waited a week for em. As you will see in the photo SWF , it worked out nicely.

*And then JayCar ran out of those Chrome LED bezels....... and took forever to get them in again........ useless Chinese run shitshop >_>

Anyway, Here's the shockwave flash file i made. It contains 64 mostly commented photo's, so you know whats happening in each pic On a side note - Don't EVER use Amara Flash SlideshowBuilder, it's Just  not worth it

<a href="http://forums.ledstuff.co.nz/UserFiles/The%20finished%20produkt.swf" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://forums.ledstuff.co.nz/UserFiles/The%20finished%20produkt.swf</a>

 * EDIT: Like any good project, I've decided that it's not finished. I'm going to wire up the rest of the LED's to a switch in order to have dual lighting modes!, With the switch pushed in, one whole row of LED's will light up per read\write operation, Off it will be as it is in the video = Updates coming soon!

And finally, a very quick, very dirty and hardly edited video of it in action
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOp9G6CuVnk

[Carl]

Richie,
  WOW its great to finally see this on here! I think its a great write up you did and will be a good resource for people wanting to do similar things.
  Your server looks like it packs a bit of punch too. I build my own computers and the old ones usually go into making up a server. Currently we run our TV via our server which also manages our downloading (all legal of course *cough*) and my backups. Oh and I just bought a D-Link DNS323 NAS and put a 1.5TB hard drive in it, and have ONLY used 900GB of it.
  Anyways... Farnell are good for getting samples on short notice, however I don't get product from them long term as their pricing is .. shall I say.. less than ideal. I often purchase from Digikey in the US.

  I was happy to be a help and be apart of your project. Being an electronic engineer myself, and having a love for LEDs, I like seeing other people doing these sorts of projects.
 
Cheers,
  Carl

[produKtNZ]

I'm glad you liked the write-up! And yes, I hope this article and my steps help others in doing the same thing, or similar!

There's plenty of these cards floating around both TradeMe and eBay and their good cards especially for the home pc enthusiast etc!, So there's plenty of scope for people wanting to do the same thing.

Did you like the swf photo thing I did? It took bloody hours lol. And if you flick thru the photos fast enough, in parts it appears to be a stop motion movie

Overall I'm very happy with how it turned out. And even 16 days later after I buttoned everything up i still look at it and think wow

[Carl]

I thought I would also post the link to the video you sent me too...

Binary HDD Panel

[produKtNZ]

But i linked to it in my first post? (near the bottom) ?

[Carl]

Duh! 

[produKtNZ]

Well well, here I am again

This time I'm fishing for new idea's.
The Adaptec card is painfully slow at Raid 5 - Especially rebuilding.

I'm looking to upgrade to the
Dell SAS 6/iR Integrated SAS & SATA Controller
256mb DDRram
333MHZ IOP Processor.
Supports 10 SATA2 HDD's
As opposed to my current card

Adaptec 2610SA
64Mb SDram
100MHZ IOP.
Supports 6 Sata1 HDD's

I have re-powered the server to a board that's got DDR  and dual 2ghz cpu's as-well. So I've got the baseline home server grunt, just not the disk operations grunt :S


The binary panel I made is only really suited to to numbers 1 - 6 in base? representation due to me using 3 Columns (1,2,4). It's not possible to make 8 9 or 10 using the same representative system as the max is seven '1+2+4'.

What to do?
I would have to start again.
I could add another column making it possible to get past '7' in Binary but I would have to use 3mm led's or even SMD's to fit the panel in the 2.5inch wide square i cut in the front of the server.
Or scrap the panel and think of something fresh.
Or keep the Display Panel type idea and use SMD's and a circuit board

Argh --_--

[Carl]

Well, aren't you just a sucker for more power. Are you trying to hack into the Pentagon or something with all that computing power? 

About the LED panel, being an electronic engineer, I could help you design a board with SMD LEDs on it which could look quite nice, however it depends on how much you want to spend. I get PCBs made in China all the time, but the minimum cost is about $200.

Alternatively, you could just use some vero-board and make up an array of LEDs, say 4 to make a binary display of 0-15, or 10 high for a simple 0-10. I think going away from binary to just a "level meter" type arrangement would look better, however I may have the wrong idea on what you are displaying...

Is it a level number you are displaying that will go up and down, or is it a drive number or such? What about just using a 7-segment display to display a number from 0-9?

[produKtNZ]

A sucker for more power? Well of course! I am Generation Y!
I Must Have MOAR! >_>

Yea I could hack the Pentagon and grab the presidents pron collection

But seriously, I remote desktop to the server on a daily basis.

Utorrent picks up torrents from a shared drive on my Desktop PC, and I browse over and stop em from seeding, amend, pause, move files around, rename, defrag and play web-based games and leave them logged in overnight etc.
And it's slow. Really slow. SD-RAM Kills performance something chronic. Dragging a window, for example, is a slideshow affair.

So that's why I updated that.

Then I installed the 4 1tb disks I bought recently and made a raid5 array without a global hot spare. Copied a whole lot of files to it (about 1tb) then I unplugged a Disk while it was reading files which caused the array to turn to degraded causing the array to fail and a rebuild needed.

I replaced the disk I took out with a blank 1tb drive from my Desktop PC and set it to rebuild.

Long story short: It took just over 200 ish hours, Around 10days to rebuild 1TB from parity. If a harddrive failed and i had to rebuild, Another harddrive would fail in that time! >_<

About the LED Panel:
The binary rep is the way I wanna go about it. There are alternatives like a LED bar graph for each hdd or something. But then we're knocking on Mr Expensiveness's Door... (I've spent enough already!)

I reckon I can Draw out a Circuitboard trace diagram. I'm already working on it in front of me in fact.

If I wanted to goto a 10HDD RAID controller I would have to do 4 Columns with 10 rows. The circuit board would have a common +5v trace to power the led's and a  negative sink for each.

I would probably design the traces on the board to run from left to right having one common +5v line for each row, then trace that down to the plug in the middle left & then a trace connected to the LED's that are to be in use, then also down to the plug.

Sounds really simple. Too simple perhaps?

"Is it a level number you are displaying that will go up and down, or is it a drive number or such? "

Well I have 6 hdd's on the card atm. If i wanted to use a single LED i would then have to find a way of labeling the LED so i know which hardrive is doing what - (The very basis of this project!). A vivid marker will not do. And this is when my flatmate suggested about the binary stuff as in my original post

[Carl]

Hmm, I am a bit confused mate. If you have 10 hard drives, and for each drive you want a 0-7 binary display (3 LEDs), then would you have 3 columns and 10 rows where each row is a different HDD?
If you had 7 LEDs to show 0-7 for each HDD, then you would need 7 columns and 10 rows. Are we on the same page here? Is that too many LEDs?

Could you explain exactly what the display is actually showing for each HDD? Is it the level of activity on a scale of 0-7, or something else? What is the input signal, and how is it being decoded to the binary display (3 LEDs)?

[produKtNZ]

Ah.

You see, i've assumed you would know about the deeper realms of computers being an electronics engineer. I was wrong? Or i just can't explain?

"Is it a level number you are displaying that will go up and down, or is it a drive number or such? What about just using a 7-segment display to display a number from 0-9?"
I missed this. It displays a drive number.


The issue being, how to make a panel that will visually display up to 10 hdd ports, as opposed to the current 6


Have to admit, I'm confused now aswell =\

*EDIT:
In previous posts, I've referred to columns as rows. Sorry, that would have had a part in the confusion

Perhaps this would help
http://www.wikihow.com/Read-a-Binary-Clock

[Carl]

Mate, I've been reading binary for a long time lol...

You obviously want to display a number, but what I was asking was what is the meaning behind the number. If I actually know what you are trying to achieve, rather than just assuming you want to display a bunch of meaningless numbers, then I thought I could actually offer some advice on how to display them. LOL

You sort of answered it by saying its a drive number. However, I am still a bit confused about the purpose of the display. You will display 10 numbers, which will be the 10 drive numbers? So the display will never change? I thought the display will be some sort of dynamically changing array of numbers (such as drive activity). Is it just displaying the numbers of drives that are connected? How about an example of what will be displayed in a particular situation? Sorry for not getting it haha.

[produKtNZ]

"I thought the display will be some sort of dynamically changing array of numbers (such as drive activity)."

That's exactly what it is. Replacing physically (ie with pen, sticker etc) labelling a group of activity LED's with binary.

Weirdly, i think this is an situation where i don't understand what you don't understand. So new information is introduced to clarify, which in turn further complicates the situation and makes it even harder to understand.

>_>

I am making a new video ;p, It's in edit now