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SE/30 hard drive LED mod

PB145B

Well-known member
I thought I'd show off this little modification I did to my SE/30s hard drive LED. I always loved the look of the red hard drive LED on the early production SE machines, so I thought it would be kinda neat to have one in an SE/30. I love the sort of "evil" look it gives to the machine.

I had been wanting to do this for a while and since I was upgrading the hard drive anyways (from 420MB to 1.2GB), this was the perfect opportunity to do it! I am still considering a SCSI2SD but I love mechanical drives! Can't beat those wonderful sounds that they make! RAM is going to be the next upgrade for this SE/30.

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Skate323k137

Well-known member
Very nice.

I put a blue LED in mine when I did the scsi2sd upgrade. You'll be able to hook your LED to the scsi2sd when you get one ;)

 

Scott Baret

Well-known member
Nice! I also put a blue LED in an SE once and it looks really neat!

I too like the red LED on the SE. They seemed to come exclusively with the 20MB MiniScribe; larger capacity Quantums almost always had the amber light (although I have seen a few very late model SEs with green LEDs--they may not be original though).

 

Von

Well-known member
The drive sled that my first SE/30 came with was red, yet I have another with a green led and 2 other sleds without an led at all. So what was the stock color LED in the SE/30? 

 

PB145B

Well-known member
Thanks for the kind words everyone!

So what was the stock color LED in the SE/30? 
The stock LED color was yellow.

They seemed to come exclusively with the 20MB MiniScribe
I’ve seen the RED LED on Rodime drives too. I believe the very earliest production SEs came with Rodime 20MB drives (however I could be wrong). I have yet to see a newer SE with a RED LED though. All of the ones I have seen so far with a red LED have been the ones that say “copyright 1986” on the labels rather that “copyright 1988” like the newer ones have. My 800k SE from 1989 has a Miniscribe 20MB drive with a yellow LED.

 
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