Blackbird/Building FAQ

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The HDD activity LED is on when the disk is idle and off when the disk is active!

We are aware of several name brand disks, both SATA and NVMe, that invert the drive activity LED signals by default. This may be related to expected installation in laptop or other mobile environments, where an inverted signal seems to be relatively common.

With Blackbird we provide a mechanism to make the front panel HDD indicator LED either active asserted (default from factory, called "inverted") or active deasserted (for these less common drives). If your HDD LED seems stuck on or otherwise operates the opposite way you would expect, follow these steps to see if they resolve the problem:

  • Log in to the BMC
  • Run this command: i2cset -y 12 0x31 0x11 0x0

The result should be immediate -- if this restores the HDD LED to proper operation on your system, you can make the change permanent by editing the /usr/bin/fpga-setup.sh file and changing the last value in the HDD LED command to 0x0. If you want to restore the original operation at any time, you can set it back to 0x1.