How to disable the 3.3v pin on Western Digital USB White Label Drives

so you got yourself some brand spankin new external USB storage from Western Digital and somebody on the interwebs told you that you can take the hard drive out of it and install it directly into your computer this could have been me and for the most part that's correct so in today's video let's show you how to use these Western Digital white label drives in a regular computer okay before you try this the first thing you have to do is carefully remove the external enclosure from the box it came in and don't worry unless you're smart and decide to test things before you break them you really don't need to worry about anything else in the box then make sure to take your time peeling the protective plastic film off to get that full new electronics filling that we all crave so much this is not a necessary step but it is highly recommended and allowed me to talk long enough to show you this pill porn after that I would consider watching a better YouTube channel tutorial on how to remove the drive from the enclosure without damaging the plastics but if you're like me yellow you're just gonna stab the thing with a sharp object and twist it to make it come apart just be careful not to stick said sharp object in the actual hard drive itself that would be bad now that you have successfully removed your brand-new hard drive out of its enclosure you're probably going to want to plug it into your computer just to see if it's recognized chances are once you plug it in your machine it won't even be able to see it at the BIOS screen this is because the amazing people over at Western Digital decided to use the 3.3 volt pin to keep the hard drive from powering on with normal power supplies I'm sure they have the reasons but I just don't like them what I'm talking about here is the third pin from the left on the power connector on the hard drive this 3.3 volt pin activates a hard reset loop for the hard drive that keeps it from showing up in your computer regular consumer drives lack the hardware reset option and ignores this 3.3 volt line completely and your power supply or server backplate may or may not have this line constantly powered so you may not even run into this issue but thankfully though if you are having issues this is an easy thing to bypass now there are multiple ways to do this but I'm only going to show the least destructive and safe way doing things like removing the pin from the drive using liquid tape or even a molex power adapter could run the risk of completely voiding your warranty or causing a fire hazard the method that I'm going to use is just simply using a small piece of electrical tape to cover up the third pin now you only have to cut it big enough to cover the third pin but a good thing to note here is that the first and second pins are not required to power the drive so you can just cut a tape a little bit bigger if you want and cover up these pins as well this can make things a little easier for you and might even allow it to stick better to the hard drive once you're done covering these up your drive should look a little like this again make sure to cover up at least the third pin don't cover up any part of the fourth pin and if you cover up the first or second don't worry about it now you should be able to install your brand new hard drive in your computer using any standard SATA power supply connections and since it's no longer stuck in a hard reset loop you should now see it in your BIOS screen as a quick demonstration I haven't booted into Windows found the drive with the file explorer and copied data to it so I can now use this drive just like any old regular hard drive if this doesn't work for you remove the SATA power cable and make sure that the tape then it fall off during installation if it's still there and your hard drive isn't being recognized in your computer you might have covered up the wrong pin well that's it for today guys if you have any questions or comments leave them down in the comment section below as always thank you for watching like and subscribe and have yourself a good day

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 563,514

Keywords: Western, digital, white, label, drive, 3.3, 3.3v, 3rd pin, 3 pin, 3 volt, delete, disable, WD, Shucking, shucked, usb, hdd, how to, western digital, wd red, hard drive, wd white label, cheap storage, hard drives, wd elements, external hard drive, western digital external hard drive, western digital my cloud

Id: 1YqMn1pCRd8

Length: 3min 34sec (214 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019