Farming Hard Drives (2012)

I think a lot of the larger form-factor/larger capacity models are still shuckable, though sometimes you still have to put kapton tape on one of the pins to allow it to work with a normal machine.

Pin 3 on the power connector used to be constant 3.3V, but its purpose changed to keeping the drive in a low-power shutdown state for enabling e.g. staggered spinup: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hdd-sata-power-disable-fea...

Yep.

And when that's a problem, it's fine to just cut and insulate 3.3v wire that feeds the power supply's SATA connectors.

After this modification, the machine thus becomes compatible with all SATA hard drives, whether old or new or shucked or whatever.

(Not much (if anything) in SATA land ever used 3.3v, and it's completely likely that nothing ever will. AFAICT, that voltage was deprecated with the release of revision 3.3 of the SATA specifications, from nearly a decade ago in February of '16.)

> sometimes you still have to put kapton tape on one of the pins to allow it to work with a normal machine.

It's easier to cut the 3.3v wire from the power supply. If you have color coded wires, it'll be the orange wire; if not, it'll be the same color as every other wire.

To a first approximation, nothing ever uses 3.3v from sata power, so it made sense to remove it from the spec. Reusing the pins so that 3.3v inhibits functionality was kind of crazy though.