Author: Michael Crider / Source: howtogeek.com
You may have pins on the back of your hard drive that nothing is connected to. These pins are called jumpers, and are used to enable specific types of settings. They’re not used so much with modern hard drives, except in some special circumstances.
If you’re under a certain age, or you just haven’t been into computer hardware for long, you’ve probably never heard of hard drive jumpers.
The jumper pins are similar to the pins on the I/O plate on a motherboard. You enable particular settings by placing a jumper shunt onto specific pins—creating an electrical circuit between them. The settings these jumpers enable are hard-coded onto a drive’s programmed printed circuit board.
So what do jumpers do? Well, not so much anymore.
Back before SATA became the standard interface for drives, computers used the Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) standard. You may remember the wide, flat parallel data cables used to connect them. In a parallel ATA setup, multiple drives in a computer needed to be set up as “master” and “slave” drives, a way of identifying and prioritizing drives…
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