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I have long wondered what this port is on some harddrives?

I assume it may be some sort of serial or factory programming port. The top-most hard drive in the stack pictured below is an SSD, it has the same pins, just not broken out on a connector.

mystery port

madmaze
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    These are jumpers that are used for various things depending on the HDD manufacture. In a land no so long ago, some IDE HDDs used these jumpers for master/slave designation. [This question was answered here as well](http://superuser.com/questions/56270/why-does-a-sata-hard-drive-have-jumpers/) – one.time Aug 28 '13 at 20:15

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The are jumper pin arrays for sata specific options. IDE drives could be daisy chained so they had more options so they used 8-pin arrays, but its the same basic concept. jumper a pair of pins to enable a setting.

see more info here: What is the purpose of this 4-pin interface on SATA HDDs and why doesn't it exist on SSDs?

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Frank Thomas
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