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Why is my drive not powering up and What is a power disable enabled HDD
SAS interface and many new SATA drives now come standard with the power disable (PWDIS) feature. This allows the host server to power cycle the drive if needed. Seagate P/Ns ending in "OG" and Western Digital P/Ns ending in "04" have this feature.
Most data center oriented servers that support hot-plug have no issues with this feature, however most consumer power supplies (and nearly all manufactured before 2016) have 5 wires on the SATA power plug. 12v, Ground, 5v, Ground and 3.3v. It's this 3.3v (Typically an orange wire) that is causing this issue, as newer drives use one of the 3.3v pins for the power disable pin.
If your power cables have only four wires you should not have an issue with the PWDIS pin receiving voltage. If your PSU SATA cables do have all 5 wires, you can put a piece of kapton tape over the 3.3v pins.
Since the passthrough connectors in our storage cases are passive and pass through all of the pins from the front side to the back, if a drive has the PWDIS feature and the power supply used is providing 3.3v, the drive will be stuck in "Disabled Mode" until the 3.3v pins do not have power.
Most data center oriented servers that support hot-plug have no issues with this feature, however most consumer power supplies (and nearly all manufactured before 2016) have 5 wires on the SATA power plug. 12v, Ground, 5v, Ground and 3.3v. It's this 3.3v (Typically an orange wire) that is causing this issue, as newer drives use one of the 3.3v pins for the power disable pin.
If your power cables have only four wires you should not have an issue with the PWDIS pin receiving voltage. If your PSU SATA cables do have all 5 wires, you can put a piece of kapton tape over the 3.3v pins.
Since the passthrough connectors in our storage cases are passive and pass through all of the pins from the front side to the back, if a drive has the PWDIS feature and the power supply used is providing 3.3v, the drive will be stuck in "Disabled Mode" until the 3.3v pins do not have power.