Where to buy jumpers for hard drives

You enable particular settings by placing a jumper shunt onto specific pins—creating an electrical circuit between them. You may remember the wide, flat parallel data cables used to connect them. So why are the jumper pins still around? On those that do, they enable a few specialized settings. Exactly what the pins do depends on your drive and its manufacturer. Unless you have need of those specialty settings, you can safely ignore the jumper pins on your drive.

It will work fine without them on pretty much any computer made in the last ten years. Most of the options above are included for the sake of backwards compatibility. Image credit: Western Digital. Browse All iPhone Articles Browse All Mac Articles Do I need one?

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Best VR Headsets. Best iPad Mini Cases. Best Gifts for Cutting the Cord. Best Bluetooth Speakers. Awesome PC Accessories. Best Linux Laptops. Best Gaming Monitors. Best iPads. Best iPhones. Remove the the jumper if you don't need to limit the data transfer rate, such as on most modern servers or if it is the only hard drive on your computer.

Locate the jumper block on the back of the hard drive. There are eight pins arranged in two rows on the right side, directly beside the power connector. Pins are numbered right to left, with odd numbers on the top row and even numbers on the bottom row.

Place the jumper on pins 1 and 2 to disable the drive's spread spectrum clocking feature. These are the top and bottom pins on the right side of the block.

These are the top and bottom pins, second from the left. These are the top and bottom pins, second from the right. PM2 mode enables you to power up the drive while in standby mode using the ATA standard control signup command on a multi-drive server or workstation.

A published author and professional speaker, David Weedmark has advised businesses and governments on technology, media and marketing for more than 20 years.