Hands on help: Protecting the PSU with hard disk spin delay

Q I’m putting together a home Linux server with a couple of mirrored drives. The case has two extra hard disk drive LEDs attached by cable to a two-pin female connector.

These connectors fit on an anonymous two-pin male socket on the back of my Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200GB Sata (Serial ATA) drives, but the purpose of that two-pin connector eludes me.
Chris Chaffey

A According to a white paper on Maxtor’s website, the two-pin connector forces a delayed spin-up. In some systems, powering up multiple hard disks simultaneously can be too much for a power supply to handle, so delaying the spin-up on selected disks can reduce the strain.

The Sata standard can implement a spin-up delay by sending a signal to pin 11 on the Sata data cable, but the jumper on the back of the Maxtor drives allows you to force a delayed spin-up. Maxtor advises this shouldn’t be an issue for systems with one or two disks though.

The disk activity lights on your case should be connected to the two-pin header for the disk controller.

If you’re using an integrated or chipset-based hard disk controller, the header for the HDD case light will be with the group of headers for the power switch, reset button and other case lights in the corner of your motherboard. Markings on the board should identify it, but if not, full details are in your manual.