Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 May 21

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May 21

Spare connector on SATA drives

What is the purpose of the spare 4 pin connector on some SATA drives? Can it be used to daisy chane two SATA drives?--81.140.208.37 (talk) 15:20, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Many drives have jumper blocks which allow you to configure some basic options; in particular, for backwards compatibility with older BIOSes and OSes. Worrying about these was much more common for P-ATA drives, and I don't recall needing to set one for at least five years. These blocks are vendor (and often model) specific, and they're not always fully documented (meaning some of the functions they represent are used only in manufacture and post-manufacture test). So you'll have to find the documentation for your specific drive in order to find out what the connector does. Some examples: Western Digital, Seagate. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 15:40, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you.--81.140.208.37 (talk) 15:57, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

And many are an RS-232 serial interface you can use a terminal to communicate with the drive.[1] -- Gadget850 ^talk 17:51, 21 May 2015 (UTC)