HDD LEDs blink abnormally

Purpose

This article elaborates why the hard drive status LED behaves unexpectedly even there's no HDD installed.

Audience

All users who are using Advantech SKY-8K series products.

Description

The HDD LEDs of SKY-8101 and SKY-8201 series will appear abnormally blinking when there are no HDDs in the system as below.  This issue could be fixed by enabling the SATA hot-plug settings under BIOS.

This is a known issue for Intel Lewisburg. According to the Intel EDS, “If hot plug is disabled and there are no devices attached to the SATA/SSATA ports, then the SGPIO pins will not function correctly”