I am looking to purchase some 10TB drives to upgrade my 24 drive unraid system.  Ideally once I have a 10TB parity drive in position I could add a few more and pull out 7-8 of my 10 year old 1.5TB drives.  

 

The case is not that old though.  Probably 4-5 years.   

 

As documented here - https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/HGST-Power-Disable-Pin-TB.pdf . Many new drives are coming with a new Power Disable Feature.  Apparently you need a power supply that supports this feature or you buy an adapter than removes Pin 3.  

 

However my older Norco cases has a back plane that supplies all the connections for the drives.  Does anyone know if I get drives with this Power Disable Feature  - will they work?  I prefer not to have to cut wires or put tape over pins.

 

If you are in the know - please let me know.

 

Thank you.

 

Sounds like you just need to check if pin 3 is supplying 3.3v if it is, you can't use those drives without a hack.

Edited January 17, 20188 yr by Chris Pollard

On 1/16/2018 at 1:38 AM, jesseasi said:

Does anyone know if I get drives with this Power Disable Feature  - will they work?  I prefer not to have to cut wires or put tape over pins.

 

Probably not without a hack.   The best solution would be to just buy drives without that feature.  If you are buying HGST drives they sell ones with or without power disable feature.

Edited January 18, 20188 yr by TUMS

Ok. well if you have a Norco 4224 older model - not sure when they updated them...but when installing one of these power disable drives - they do not spin up.  Now I need to find a hack?  an adapter?  or see if Norco can sell me an updated backplane?

 

Anyone here can point me in the right direction?

 

27 minutes ago, jesseasi said:

Now I need to find a hack?

This is the easiest and best hack.

On 1/16/2018 at 4:38 AM, jesseasi said:

put tape over pins.

Use Kapton tape, it's extremely thin, great adhesive, it's specifically meant to insulate connections. In short, it's meant for this type of application.

Well that was super easy.  I bought some Tapcon tape - arrived today - took me 10 minutes with some reading glasses and tweezers to cut and apply the tape.  Plug it in and spun right up!