What difference would it make if jumpers are assigned when installing a new hard drive, or is it even important?
Computer jumpers effect on hard drive
Hello Mr. Scott,
Here is your answer:
Jumpers are used in hard drives to assign one drive as master (primary) and the other drive as slave (secondary). As the data cannot travel to and from both hard drives simultaneously henceforth priority on the drives needs to be designated.
Jumper itself is a small metal device with plastic cover, used for insulation. The metal plates works as a switch to make or break connection. Jumpers are located at the back of the hard drive, the jumper settings can be seen at the back or at the top of hard drive depending on the type of vendor. Other details can be found by visiting the vendor website, goto the hard drive company’s website and select Jumper settings/Jumper guide.
The two hard drives are connected using an IDE (Integrated Device/Drive Electronics) cable, the cable interconnects the two drives with the motherboard, such that the motherboard and master drive are connected at each ends and slave drive is connected between them. Most hard drive come in a factory default setting of cable select. The Cable select means that the main board will itself assign drives as primary or secondary and jumpers setting are important.
Computer jumpers effect on hard drive
When installing a new hard drive, configuring the jumper settings is very important because this sets or enables the function of the drive to work properly. All hard drives have the same pin configuration on its main jumper settings. The main jumper settings for a hard drive are master, slave, cable select, and park. The “master” setting sets the hard drive as master drive and this allows you to boot from the drive. The “slave” setting sets the drive as slave drive or support drive. In this pin configuration you can’t do a system boot.
In “cable select”, the configuration of the drive depends on which connector it is attached. Normally, ribbon cables have 4 connectors excluding the bottom part that connects directly to the board. The first connector is the primary master, second is the primary slave, third is the secondary master, and the fourth is the secondary slave. These connectors are only available on those longer ribbon cables that can connect four drives. Setting your hard drive to “park” is similar to completely disabling it.
Besides the main jumper settings of the hard drive that sets its role on the computer, there is also another pin configuration on the hard drive that can set or limit the actual disk space of the drive but this is optional. All of the jumper settings can be found on the drive itself. You must check the correct positions of the jumpers because not all drives have the same jumper positions.
