My Acard AEC-7720U scsi to ide card has a connection that drives an LED. When I had this installed with a 3.5 inch IBM 7200 IDE drive in my SE/30, I had the drive mounted backwards in the drive sled so that the Acard and drive power and scsi connections were pointing towards the front of the case rather than the rear (stock orientation). This allowed me to use the stock LED (with short lead wires) built into the drive sled to connect to the Acard and this gave me the desired flashing of the drive light when it was in use. I don't think I have a photo of this rig as I too am working my way towards an SSD but in a slightly different route. My plan was to connect the Acard to a 4GB Transcend IDE flash drive that I picked up from Buy.com: http://www.buy.com/prod/transcend-4gb-flash-module-4-gb-ide-internal/q/loc/101/207652979.html.
The snag with this approach is that the Acard and the Transcend drive have the same connection on them (like what is on an IDE ribbon cable) so I needed to track down some sort of gender changer/coupler. My first attempt was with this http://cgi.ebay.com/40-Pin-3-5-IDE-Drive-Gender-Changer-IDC-Cable-Adaptor_W0QQitemZ360188509658QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Computing_CablesConnectors_RL?hash=item53dce87dda#ht_1074wt_1051 however this straight pin approach doesn't line the pins up correctly. Next I tried this ribbon cable http://cgi.ebay.com/2-inches-40-Pin-Male-to-Male-IDE-Gender-Changer_W0QQitemZ280448912385QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item414c0ecc01#ht_500wt_1037. Going this route initially didn't work in that the SE/30 (stock configuration with 8MB RAM) didn't see the drive when I booted to a 7.01 floppy. The Acard was in the same configuration as it was when it was successfully working with a hard drive so I don't think that was the issue. Next I pulled the Transcend drive and installed in a Mac with an IDE connection, formatted the drive and copied a working 7.01 install onto the Transcend. I then installed the Transcend back into the SE/30 and booted to the Sys 7 floppy and now the drive appeared. I used system picker to bless 7.01 system on the Transcend drive and then booted successfully to the Transcend drive. The issue that remains is that after the system boots, it will lock up when I attempt to open any programs. From there I need to power off... That is were I left the project a few months ago. I'll have some free time in the next couple of weeks to fiddle with this again. If anyone has thoughts on what went sideways, I'd love to hear them.
Assuming I can get this working, I was planning on using 3M double sided tape to secure the Acard and Transcend drive to the drive sled after I coat the area under the pieces with electrical tape. One more thing...when the system was booting with the Transcend drive, the Acard LED was flashing..
The snag with this approach is that the Acard and the Transcend drive have the same connection on them (like what is on an IDE ribbon cable) so I needed to track down some sort of gender changer/coupler. My first attempt was with this http://cgi.ebay.com/40-Pin-3-5-IDE-Drive-Gender-Changer-IDC-Cable-Adaptor_W0QQitemZ360188509658QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Computing_CablesConnectors_RL?hash=item53dce87dda#ht_1074wt_1051 however this straight pin approach doesn't line the pins up correctly. Next I tried this ribbon cable http://cgi.ebay.com/2-inches-40-Pin-Male-to-Male-IDE-Gender-Changer_W0QQitemZ280448912385QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item414c0ecc01#ht_500wt_1037. Going this route initially didn't work in that the SE/30 (stock configuration with 8MB RAM) didn't see the drive when I booted to a 7.01 floppy. The Acard was in the same configuration as it was when it was successfully working with a hard drive so I don't think that was the issue. Next I pulled the Transcend drive and installed in a Mac with an IDE connection, formatted the drive and copied a working 7.01 install onto the Transcend. I then installed the Transcend back into the SE/30 and booted to the Sys 7 floppy and now the drive appeared. I used system picker to bless 7.01 system on the Transcend drive and then booted successfully to the Transcend drive. The issue that remains is that after the system boots, it will lock up when I attempt to open any programs. From there I need to power off... That is were I left the project a few months ago. I'll have some free time in the next couple of weeks to fiddle with this again. If anyone has thoughts on what went sideways, I'd love to hear them.
Assuming I can get this working, I was planning on using 3M double sided tape to secure the Acard and Transcend drive to the drive sled after I coat the area under the pieces with electrical tape. One more thing...when the system was booting with the Transcend drive, the Acard LED was flashing..