Sata hard drive has 2 power connectors

[gera229]

http://www.sevenforums.com/attachments/hardware-devices/41749d1260644076-installing-sata-dvd-blu-ray-burner-sata_hard_drive_connectors_jumpers.jpg

In the image above that is like how my sata hard drive looks like. It has 2 power connectors. 1 is a sata power connector and the other is a molex.

Do I connect the power to both of these connectors? What will happen if I do?
Why are there 2 power connectors?

Which one is better to use and why?

Also you can see that SATA have jumpers. On my hard drive I do not have any jumpers set and in the picture there is 1 jumper set. What are the jumpers in SATA for?

 

[MRFS]

> Do I connect the power to both of these connectors?

No. One or the other, BUT NOT BOTH!!

You may damage your HDD if you connect power to both.


> Which one is better to use and why?

They're the same, as far as HDDs are concerned.


> What are the jumpers in SATA for?

http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/wd/western.digital.jumper.settings.pdf

5-6 will override the default 300 MB/sec interface
and set it to 150 MB/second.

The others are explained in the Jumper Settings document above.


MRFS

 

[gera229]

I understand now.

My other question is who needs to lower the speed?

Also I heard SSC makes it worse and only to use it if you need it based on my research. But who needs it? Why? What does it do for those that need it?
Is just 1 hard drive going to exceed the FCC limit?

 

[sub mesa]

For 1,5Gbps controllers not adhering to the specs, causing them to have compatibility issues with 3Gbps HDDs. For those 1,5Gbps controllers you would need to set a jumper on the SATA disk to limit its speed to 1,5Gbps. This shouldn't be necessary; it's essentially a workaround for bugs in early SATA controllers.

 

[gera229]

Ok, I have all of the information I needed. So I am assuming that I do not need to place jumpers on my HDD. Except that I didn't get answers about the SSC affecting FCC part.

 

[gera229]

Best answer selected by gera229.

 

[tomgibby]

Regarding your Sata hard drive with 2 power connectors

You asked:

Also I heard SSC makes it worse and only to use it if you need it based on my research. But who needs it? Why? What does it do for those that need it?
Is just 1 hard drive going to exceed the FCC limit?

The answer is: There is no way you need to utilize SSC with 1 hard drive. It's disabled by default for a reason. There is no way it is going to create enough electromagnetic interference to exceed FCC regulations. There are two main side effects of SSC. First of all, devices that are highly dependent on clocks, such as SCSI devices, may not perform as well. Second, any systems running at higher-than-rated clock speeds will almost certainly crash or lock up if you enable SSC.