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XPS 8900 Disk Drive Activity Light?
I am planning to replace the supplied SATA disk drive in my XPS 8900 with an M2 SSD model. The Addonics card I am installing for the SSD has a connection (and cable) for an external hard disk drive activity light (which allows me to see when the disk drive is active). Can you please tell me if there is a connector on the XPS 8900 system board that I can use for this purpose?
Thanks.
ManyDimensions
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January 4th, 2017 22:00
When replacing your mechanical drive with the M2 SSD it would be a good idea to clone the mechanical drive first with the M2SSD attached to a USB 3.0 port. Adapters for such are readily available.
Once the clone drive is made, disconnect the mechanical drive (temporarily) and install the M2SSD as your only bootable drive as to let it become your primary C:\ drive. (assuming that is what you want) Once it is recognized as your primary drive, you can reconnect your mechanical drive for use as a secondary storage drive.
To answer your question specifically, the M2 SSD activity will show up on your case LED indicator so long as it is installed into the M2 specific slot on the motherboard but NOT in a peripheral card.
JRN92
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January 5th, 2017 17:00
Unfortunately the SSD is mounted in a PCIe card for better performance. Are there any pin sets on the system board for disk drive activity light connection?
Thanks for your help.
ejn63
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January 5th, 2017 18:00
Not that are accessible short of splicing the wiring harness -- and that only if you can figure out which pins and live with the inevitable bootup error that will result.
You may be able to find a bay-mount control panel that has an LED you can connect to the card, but there's no practical way to do so using the system's front panel, mainboard and wiring.