I have long wondered what this port is on some harddrives?
I assume it may be some sort of serial or factory programming port. The top-most hard drive in the stack pictured below is an SSD, it has the same pins, just not broken out on a connector.
1 Answer
The are jumper pin arrays for sata specific options. IDE drives could be daisy chained so they had more options so they used 8-pin arrays, but its the same basic concept. jumper a pair of pins to enable a setting.
see more info here:What is the purpose of this 4-pin interface on SATA HDDs and why doesn't it exist on SSDs?
