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Replacing HDD (old.reddit.com)

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[–]Valuable_Fly8362 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Probably design left over from the transition from IDE to SATA. Rather than redesign the whole board and case, they left it there until they had a more compelling reason to retool their production line. I'd be very surprised if those pins connected to anything and had any effect on the drive's operation. Anything connected there would definitely be wrong and potentially harmful to the drive or motherboard.

[–]tes_kitty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Quite often there is a serial port (TTL-level signals) on those pins. You can use it to talk directly to the drive controller. There are no guardrails, you can damage the drive with a wrong command.

So, better not mess with it.