Hello all,
I have just installed a new DVD-RW in my machine(plextor px-800a).
All appears to be working,i can play cd,s,rip music etc.
I have noticed that when using the optical drive is being used the hard drive light is on constantly.Even opening the load tray causes the hard drive activity.
I plugged my old drive back in(also a plextor) and appears to work as normal.
Is this indicative of a faulty drive? or a compatibility problem?
My motherboard is an Asus M2n32sli deluxe running a AMD64 x2 5000 processor.
I am using the 2.6.18 kernel.
Any advice would be welcome.
Regards.
The trooper.

Hi

The hard drive light just shows when there's activity on the IDE/SATA bus(es), so using the CD drive will cause it to light up.
I'm more surprised that it didn't do this before.

Dave

Hello Dave,
Thanks for the reply.


That would make sense,just seems strange that the old unit did not cause this behavior.
I also have a second machine running an old Sony dvd-rw which also does not light up the hard drive light when in use.
Can i ask,what does your machine do when using an optical drive?
Anybody else had similar experiences?

Regards.
The trooper

Ah, now that's interesting...

I've got two optical drives on the secondary IDE channel. The light comes on when the slave (hdd) does anything, but not with the master (hdc).

Dave

I tried swapping the jumper between master and slave, no difference.....
After doing a bit more digging, it would appear certain optical drive chipsets (NEC in this case) use the IDE bus activity signalling.
I can only assume some don't
Which could explain why one drive lights up the hdd light and another does not.
A bit of guess work so feel free to correct!

Sounds reasonable to me. Every day's a school day.