have two Western Digital 120G hard drives (SATA). There is no information on any jumper settings on the package, but there are four settings.

Please help?

Felix Samuel, Punchbowl, NSW

There’s no sign of jumper settings on the package because basically you don’t need to use them. Each SATA drive has its own cable, and there’s no Master/Slave relationship to configure.

The 8-pin block you see on the drive would be a legacy of existing drive production facilities, created for application with IDE drives. Four of those pins are unused on a SATA drive, and the other four are used for power management. The drives ship with the jumper bridging pins 1 and 2, which is the setting to disable the drive’s power management feature, and having no jumper fitted at all would do the same job.

If the system’s SATA controller is capable of using the feature though, and if you actually wish to use it, you can short pins 3 and 4 to enable the feature.

For further information and further links to information about installing and configuring your drive, see “How do I set the jumper on a serial ATA drive?”

Cheers,

Terry O'Shanassy