Today, we're going to fix the 3.3V pin
problem that can prevent your Western Digital white label drives from working
in some computers. When you shuck, or remove, the internal disk from a Western
Digital Easystore external drive, you'll find either a Red label or a White label
internal disk. In a previously published video, I detailed the steps needed to
remove the disk from the enclosure non-destructively, so I won't go through
the steps here. Just remember that you're voiding your warranty by removing the
disk from its enclosure. In the past, Western Digital was using Red label
drives exclusively, but at the time of creating this video, the White label
drives are more common. The symptom of the problem is that White labels simply
won't be recognized when placed into computers using certain power supplies.
Here, I have a White label 8TB drive which has a model number of WD80EMAZ.
What I'll do is simply hook it up by connecting the power and the data
cables. I'll simply take one of the SATA power connectors coming from the power
supply, align it to the drive's pins, and connect it. Then I'll take a SATA data
cable, which is already plugged into the motherboard, and connected to the back of
the disk. Now, let's power up the machine. I'll go directly into the BIOS, and we can see that by going to the storage information,
the Western Digital drive doesn't appear at all - and thus it wouldn't be seen in
Windows either. I can see the two SSD drives that I already have in my machine,
but the new White label drive isn't recognized. This tells us that this isn't
a problem inherent to the operating system, but a hardware problem. The cause
is a new SATA specification which includes the ability to disable power to
the hard disk. When you look at the SATA connections on the back of your hard
drive, you have the narrow data connector, and the wider power connector. On the
power side, there are 15 pins that make contact with your power supply. It's the
third pin that delivers a 3.3V signal that disables the drive.
What we need to do is prevent that third pin from making contact with the power
cable. I'm going to show you two solutions. The first solution involves a piece of
Kapton tape to cover that third pin. I'll take a piece of backing paper from a
sheet of labels, and place the tape onto it. Then I'll take a piece of cardboard
and place it underneath. My goal here is to cut a thin strip of tape - enough to
cover that third pin. So I'll take a razor and gently slice off a strip of tape. As you can see, it's yellowish in color. It's a special type of non-
conductive tape that's stable at both low and high temperatures. Next, I'll
bring in the hard drive, locate that third pin, and gently apply the tape. I
highly recommend that you use an ESD wrist strap while you're doing this as
you're touching the contacts of the drive. Now the tape is too long for the pin, so
I'll snip off the excess with some scissors. Let's go back to our
computer - and as you can see, while I have the Kapton tape on the third pin, I'll
connect the power cable, which will slip right over the tape... and then I'll connect the data cable. Let's boot up the PC. Returning to the
storage information in the BIOS, we can see that the Western Digital drive is
indeed being recognized, and if you boot into Windows or whichever operating
system you're using, you will see the drive and be able to partition it and
format it. Let's talk about solution two. This one involves a SATA-to-molex power
adapter, which goes between the hard drive and the power supply. Now the one I
have has both a power adapter and a data connector, so it's a two-in-one adapter -
but all you really need is the power piece of it. They do sell just the SATA-to-
molex adapter, separate from the data cable. All you need to do is connect the
adapter to a molex plug coming from your power supply, and the other end to the
hard disk. These adapters effectively bypass pin 3 on the SATA power connector.
In my case, with this 2 -in-1 adapter, I need to connect the data piece to one of
the SATA data ports on the motherboard, which is this red cable shown here. Once
that's connected, I just plug in both the power and data connector to the hard
drive at the same time. Before I do that though, I'll confirm that I've removed
the Kapton tape from the third pin, since we won't need that for this solution. Then I can power on the computer. Once again, I've entered the BIOS and we
can see that the Western Digital drive is being recognized on the SATA port to
which I connected. Continuing to boot into Windows will allow you to see the
disk and use it as normal. There are many power supplies which will work
just fine with the White label drives, and my QNAP NAS devices work fine with them as well.
But if you ever run across a situation where the drives don't power up, you can
use one of these methods that I've covered - using the Kapton tape or the
SATA-to-molex adapter - to prevent any voltage to travel to pin three of the disk,
allowing you to use the White label Western Digital disks as internal drives. I hope you enjoyed - Thanks for watching!
