Set drive jumpers

Jumpers are little connectors which connect adjacent pins. They “jump” between the pins.

Before you set your new drive's master/slave jumper, check the setting on the drive that's already in your system to see whether it's set to "cable select" (CSEL or CS). With cable select, the ATA ribbon-cable connector determines whether the drive operates as master or slave. This makes it possible to install and rearrange drives without having to change master/slave settings, but there's a catch: You have to set the jumper on both drives on the channel to CSEL for cable select to work, and the ribbon cable must support CSEL. You may need to check your PC's documentation to determine if its cables support cable select.

Cable select means that the mainboard will choose whether to make the drive master/primary or slave/secondary. Most mainboards today support cable select. And, most drives will have their jumpers already set to cable select. You can just have all your drives set to cable select, and the mainboard will take care of the rest.


Picture:jumper on the hard drive in cable select postion


The other, more reliable, alternative is to set one drive's jumper to master and the other's to slave. You'll have to remove the existing drive to check, and possibly change, its jumper setting, but the master/slave arrangement is a foolproof approach. You usually want your main hard drive set as primary, or set it as cable select and have the mainboard set it as primary. The Western Digital instructions tell us setting the jumper to primary goes across pins on the lower, longer line of pins.
Picture:primary goes across pins on the bottom row of pins.

Or For master/Primary setting:Place jumper on the first row (vertical)away from
the power supply connector
For slave/secondary :Place jumper on the second row(vertical away from
the power supply connector


To remove jumpers, longer nails are handy, or you could use a small needle nose pliers. Be sure to push the jumper in all the way.

Serial ATA Jumpers and Cabling
Each drive on the serial ATA interface connects in a point-to-point configuration with the serial ATA host adapter. There is no master/slave relationship because each drive is considered a master in a point-to-point relationships. If two drives are attached on one serial ATA host adapter, the host operating system views the two devices as if they were both “masters” on two separate ports. This means both drives behave as if they are Device 0 (master) devices. Each drive has its own cable.


Your serial ATA host adapter may provide master/slave emulation options. See your host adapter documentation for details.



Jumper settings for Seagate SATA hard drives.


Jumper settings for Maxtor SATA hard drives.

View blog reactions