I have an ASUS P5AD2-E Premium motherboard that's loaded with SATA capability...and I've got 8 of the Maxtor 6B300S0 drives. I have actually found a way to enable an individual drive activity LED indication for each drive! It incorporates the use of Pin 11 described in this thread, which also is used for staggered startup.

The main problem with using Pin 11 is that your typical SATA power connector from the power supply, whether you're using a 4-15 pin adaptor or native power supply connector, grounds pin 11 when you put the connector on. The only time this is not the case is if the drive is connected to a custom SATA backplane interface connector.

I found that I had to put my SATA controllers in native SATA mode or RAID mode, instead of IDE mode, through the BIOS in order for these drives to be properly detected, regardless of whether the staggered start option is enabled.

That done, I saw a white paper about Pin 11 on Maxtor's site that referred to drive activity signal in a table at the end of the document. Only their SATA II drives, such as the DiamondMax 10 and Maxline III, have this feature. Yippee!

Okay, now I had to find a way to isolate Pin 11 from being grounded by the power supply connector...here's where the surgery comes in...and it's not for the timid.

You have to cut through the Pin behind the connector (really not that hard if you have a really small pair of wire cutters) and then solder a wire to the pin on the drive-side of the cut. I then connected that wire to the negative side of an LED, whose positive side goes to +5v through a 90 ohm, 1/8 watt current-limiting resistor

Bron: http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29207