Another Option to Fix 3.3v Pin Issue in White Label Disks Shucked From Western Digitial Easystore Drives

If you have a home NAS device or home server and are looking to upgrade your storage, you already know how expensive the NAS rated drives can get.  There is a pretty large following of people who purchase WD Easystore external drives when they are on sale and “shuck” them (basically open up the enclosure and remove the drive, do so at your own risk because this will void the warranty).  As of this writing, WD Easystores have been coming more and more with White Label drives, which from a lot of research online is, for the most part, a re-branded red label drive.  In fact, for a long time, the Easystores actually came with WD Reds right from the store.  

I am not going to detail out the actual specifics of the 3.3v problem here as there is plenty of information on the issue with a simple search.  Suffice it to say the drive will not always be recognized by the system because it gets stuck in a power reset cycle.  The 2 main options to solve this problem are to put some kapton tape over a specific pin on the sata power connector or to use a molex to sata adapter.  Again there is plenty of information out there on how to do this and the specifics.  I myself had been using the molex to sata adapter option, but beware that some of the cheaper made molex to sata adapters have been known to catch fire.

The alternative option I have come across and tested is to utilize a 3×5.25 to 5×3.5 Hotswap bay.  I am in the process of rebuilding my unRaid server and wanted a better option to the 3.3v pin problem.  I took a chance on buying one of these hot swap bays that fit inside 3×5.25 bays, and it worked.  I was able to put all of my WD White label drives in this enclosure without issue.  Here is a link to the bay that I used (https://amzn.to/2EjZBnC).  There are other variants out there, however, I have not tested any but this one.  I specifically chose this one because it had 2 options for power, molex or sata, which I figured would be similar to utilizing the molex to sata power adapter option.  If you have run into this problem before and have 3×5.25 bays available this is a great option to work around this issue.