Western Digital Whitepaper But wait, there's more. The easy, and not so elegant, solution is to use a 4-pin Molex to SATA connector or a power supply equipped with SATA connectors that follow the SATA 3.3 specification. This is because P3 driven HIGH will prevent the drive from powering up. All drives with this optional feature will not power up if a legacy SATA connector is used. If P3 is driven HIGH (2.1V-3.6V), the power to the drive circuitry will be cut. To sum up, for products supporting the optional SATA 3.3 power disable (PWDIS) function, the third pin (P3) of the SATA connector is now assigned as the Power Disable Control pin. That 3.3v line is apparently 3.3 no longer- at least for 2 of 3.

In most cases, it's not redundant either, it isn't broken out to 3 until the adapter. So, why not remove the spacing and make a larger contact area, if needed. Why not make a larger contact and use just one, If you look, each power pin is immediately adjacent to its friends-ġ2V-12V-12V-Gnd-Gnd-Gnd-5V-5V-5V-Gnd-Gnd-Gnd-3.3-3.3-3.3 They can't be used for signaling, you can't pull one V+ low, or pull a ground-up because it's serially connected. (Each pin should be able to provide 1.5 A.)īut why 3 of each. The best, given answer- and really the only actual answer is the quote by way of quixote from Wikipedia.Įach voltage transmits through three pins ganged together because the small contacts by themselves cannot supply sufficient current for some devices. I don't have an answer per-se, but I can share what I've learned in search of an answer: I am not sure this has been sufficiently answered.

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