On 6/10/2024 at 8:47 AM, JonathanM said:

Keep in mind that those connections are subject to vibration, and the connector is under spring tension to make the connection, so eventually the pin will reestablish the connection. Murphy's law states this will occur at the most inconvenient time possible.

 

The proper solution is polyimide tape, commonly called kapton tape. It's much better suited to this scenario.

triple coated.  im not worried.  nail polish is very hard.  

thx for the insight though.

This would make more sense to me if that the SAS drive NEEDS 3.3 volts on pin 3 to power up? I have exact same problem. Using a SAS to SATA converter and Molex power supply with no voltage on pins 1,2 and 3 at all. Windows detects the drives but states it's not ready because it will not spin up. I am using Sun Microsystem Toshiba 2.5 SAS drives.

2 hours ago, MaCJaX said:

This would make more sense to me if that the SAS drive NEEDS 3.3 volts on pin 3 to power up? I have exact same problem. Using a SAS to SATA converter and Molex power supply with no voltage on pins 1,2 and 3 at all. Windows detects the drives but states it's not ready because it will not spin up. I am using Sun Microsystem Toshiba 2.5 SAS drives.

What controller are these drives connected to?

On 10/5/2019 at 12:10 AM, doron said:

This has been mentioned here and there on the forums, but I thought I'd offer a concise guide in hope to save some grief for at least one other person 🙂

 

The symptom is quite simple: You purchased one or more new drives, you connect them to your existing setup and they just don't spin up. Seem to be DOA. So good news - most likely they're not, and you're just having a case of the SATA Pin 3 syndrome.

 

This will happen when your power supply is not of the newest crop, in one of two cases:

1. The drive is SAS, newer crop, and you are trying to connect it to a SATA-style SAS controller ports, such as those on boards like SM X10SL7-F, using contraptions such as this SATA-to-SAS adapter or that SAS-to-SATA cable.
2. The drive is SATA, newer crop.

For example, some of WD (ahem HGST) new enterprise drives - in my case, HC520 - specifically HUH721212AL4200 (SAS) or HUH721212ALN600 (SATA) - will demonstrate this issue.

 

Very briefly, the issue has to do with a newer spec of the SATA power connector. Revisions of SATA spec after Rev 3.2 (which does not have this), redefine the function of pin 3 on the SATA power connector to be Power Disable. This means that for drives supporting this feature, if the drive sees live voltage on this pin (typically 3.3V), it will power itself off (or not power on, as the case may be). (This is done in support of hot-swap enclosures and arrays, where the ability to hard-power-cycle a single drive without physical access or total system disruption is a boon.)

WD has a nice writeup about this if you want to read more.

 

So basically, if these drives see voltage on pin 3, they will not start.

 

Now, many PSUs we use these days, unless they're extremely new, would show 3.3V on all three pins: 1/2/3.

(In addition, some cheap SAS-SATA adapters short pins 1-2-3 together, so even if your PSU does not feed pin 3 with 3.3V, your drive may still see voltage there due to this "feature".)

 

So how do we fix this?

 

One way to solve this is using Molex-to-SATA power adapters, such as this. These do not carry 3.3V in (only 5V and 12V) so problem solved.

Even if you have a SATA power chain cable, you can still feed its end off of one of these and you should be good. One type of SAS-to-SATA adapter - this one - also solves the problem due to its power being fed by a Molex power plug.

 

Another way (the one I used) is to hack these adapters. So if you take a sharp cutter and gently pick up, fold and break pin 3 of the power section, counting from the L shape end, on your adapter (do not even consider doing this unto the drive itself!), you should get lucky (make very sure you get rid of the broken pin, so it doesn't find itself inside some electronics later). It will look like this:

 

On some other adapters, however, it gets slightly trickier. Seems like some of them short pins 1-2-3 together, so removing only input pin 3 does not help cuz 3.3V that's fed to pin 1 flows to the drive's pin 3. In that case, what I did is remove all three pins 1-2-3. Note that pins 1-2 are marked "reserved" in the standard, so I didn't expect anything bad to happen. And sure enough, everything started to churn. This is how it looks:

 

A similar and less destructive way to solve this issue, as mentioned below by @jonathanm, is to use a thin slice of Kapton tape and place it over pin 3. If choosing this solution I'd probably opt for applying it onto pin 3 of the drive itself, to make the solution compatible with adapters that short pins 1-2-3 together. There are several good online guides for this, e.g. this one. I didn't opt for this solution since I was unsure just how well the tiny piece of tape would withstand multiple insert/removal cycles of the plug. 

 

Now, your drives should spin up and live happily ever. 

 

Edit: Added the Kapton tape method, the SAS-SATA-Molex adapter and some text clarifications.

I know this is an old post... But Brother you helped me I had exactly this problem and I thought I have 2 dead 16TB drives. 2 minutes later everything works.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!

2 hours ago, Dragonovx said:

I know this is an old post... But Brother you helped me I had exactly this problem and I thought I have 2 dead 16TB drives. 2 minutes later everything works.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!

Thanks for reporting, glad you found it helpful!

thanks... this post and the 3.3V mod saved me after the third SAS drive (Seagate ST10000NM0096) I attempted to use didn't power up. The first two SAS drives I used (different make/model) worked fine without any mod needed.

 

Hope that helps someone in the future!

9 hours ago, monza said:

thanks... this post and the 3.3V mod saved me after the third SAS drive (Seagate ST10000NM0096) I attempted to use didn't power up. The first two SAS drives I used (different make/model) worked fine without any mod needed.

Thanks for reporting, happy this post helped you!

@doron Made an account here just to thank you so much for posting this!! If i could send a beer your way, i definitely would  Thanks especially for posting the example drive model that caused you problems. Once i saw i had the exact same drive model  I knew i was headed down the right path. Spent yesterday morning in my city searching for polyimide tape, eventually found some after blank-stares in the local arts/craft supply store and tried to tape the pins. As i pushed the drive into my server i immediately felt it power on!  

 

1 hour ago, oidsfidnsdfj said:

@doron Made an account here just to thank you so much for posting this!! If i could send a beer your way, i definitely would  Thanks especially for posting the example drive model that caused you problems. Once i saw i had the exact same drive model  I knew i was headed down the right path. Spent yesterday morning in my city searching for polyimide tape, eventually found some after blank-stares in the local arts/craft supply store and tried to tape the pins. As i pushed the drive into my server i immediately felt it power on!  

 

Thank you for reporting this, and thanks for the kind words. Your success is my reward, so I'm just happy the post helped you.