There may be pins on the back of your hard drive that nothing is connected to.

These pins are called jumpers, and are used to enable specific types of settings.

They’re not used so much with modern hard drives, except in some special circumstances.

The jumper pins are similar to the pins on the I/O plate on a motherboard.

You enable particular settings by placing a jumper shunt onto specific pins—creating an electrical circuit between them.

The settings these jumpers enable are hard-coded onto a drive’s programmed printed circuit board.