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A Closer Look:::..
In common with just about every other
internal hard drive on the market there's really nothing
very spectacular to look at, and as you'd expect for
such a monster it's no lightweight either tipping
the scales at around 1.3 pounds (0.6kg).
One of the great features on current
WD drives is choice of using conventional 4 pin Molex
power connectors or the new SATA power connector,
great news if your power supply isn't SATA ready and
you don't happen to have an adapter in the house.
In addition to the SATA power and data
connectors and the legacy power connector, the end
of the drive features a jumper setting block that
you can pretty much forget about as it's primarily
for factory use, and two strange rectangular holes,
one to the right of the SATA data connector and a
smaller one to the left of the SATA power connector....
....And these holes are part of a system
that Western Digital call "SecureConnect".
To understand what SecureConnect is and why it's required
we need only take a look at the SATA power connector.
It may have been designed with a view to being simple,
efficient and compact but as I'm sure you can imagine
it's also pretty fragile too. It really wouldn't take
much pressure on the attached data cable to fatally
wound your new drive, a costly mistake to make both
financially and possible in terms of lost data too!
SATA Power Connector
SecureConnect eliminates, or at least
reduces this risk with a combined power and data cable
and block that uses those two rectangular holes on
the end of the drive to take the strain. It's a simple
yet effective solution and perhaps my only complaint
is that the Secure Connect cable is an extra rather
than being supplied in the box.
Ever the cynic of course I could also
suggest that simply sitting the power and SATA connectors
in a snug fitting hole would also do a similar job
of reinforcing things but there is one other function
that these guide holes perform.
That silver strip you can see inside
the guide hole in the image below actually serves
to dissipate ESD when hot swapping cables.
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