I modded the Headcrash case to have four green LEDs on one of the 5-1/4″ bay covers indicating activity on each of the four hard drives. It’s an easy mod that involves cutting holes in the bay cover and connecting LEDs to the “busy out” jumper on the drive.
Unfortunately somehow when I was hooking up the LEDs I shorted out one of the drives. Thank god for warranties. The adventure begins when I receive my drive.
It turns out that Maxtor has stopped production on the Quantum Atlas IV drive, so they shipped the newer Atlas V. Normally this would not have been a problem except that the replacement drive was 6 bloody megabytes too small, preventing me from sticking it back into my RAID array.
After going back and forth between the RMA people and tech support a few times (one suggestion was pretty funny: the sales folks said that there was a firmware update that would change the number of sectors on the drive, making it a bigger drive. That’s like saying buying supreme unleaded instead of regular will turn my 4-cylinder Golf into a 6-banger!) my options ended up being wait three weeks for them to send me an 18gb drive to replace my dead 9gigger or rebuild my array with the slightly smaller drive capacity. Bleh. I wiped my array, losing 18mb off the total.
The good news is that I downloaded the latest drivers for everything, including the latest 4in1 drivers from Via, and my system is running a lot more stable by a long shot. It looks like this batch of 4in1’s cleared up whatever was causing the lockups I mentioned below.
Well, I now have four flashing LEDs that look pretty boss on my bezel, a more stable machine, and an array that’s 18mb smaller.