What is this connecter for and is it important?

[TMCThomas]

First of all, I'm sorry if this is a very dumb question but I was wondering what this connector on this hardrive does and if it is important (see image)

It's because I'm planning to buy this drive but my hot swap doesn't seem to have that connector.
Thanks in advance! Greetings, Thomas.

 

[sneekypeet]

I believe they are programmable jumpers, IE to limit the transfer speed of the drive. It is not important, you do not need to do anything to it, just plug in SATA power and SATA data cables and go to town.

 

[TMCThomas]

Thank you very much!

 

[newtekie1]

I believe they are programmable jumpers, IE to limit the transfer speed of the drive. It is not important, you do not need to do anything to it, just plug in SATA power and SATA data cables and go to town.

Yep, that is exactly what that is. Usually they are used to limit the drive to SATA 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s for older systems that have trouble with 6Gb/s SATA drives.

 

[eidairaman1]

Thank you very much!

Pretty much a left over from the IDE days but instead of being used for bus mastering it is a throttle jumper, todays modern systems dont need it, now systems from Athlon 64/Core 2 days or older needed their speed to match the SATA 150 interface...

 

[taz420nj]

Its actually a serial port. Jumpering pins 1 and 2 are for 1.5Gbps limiting but pin 2 is ground, pin 3 is RXD, and pin 4 is TXD. You can use it to reset ATA security on some drives.

 

[R-T-B]

Its actually a serial port. Jumpering pins 1 and 2 are for 1.5Gbps limiting but pin 2 is ground, pin 3 is RXD, and pin 4 is TXD. You can use it to reset ATA security on some drives.

I was going to say this but figured no one here would care, lol.