Zimacube does not seem to support power disable drives or am I missing something?
I’ve installed 6 HGST Ultrastar He12 drives and found they did not spin up, were not recognized by the OS.
These are “Enterprise” drives and like many of this type they have power disable.
These same drives work flawlessly in my other NASs such as my Terramaster and Synology support drives that have Power Disable without me having to do anything to the drive.
So far the only way to get drives which have power disable is to tape over (or destroy) the 3.3v power pin to disable the feature of the drive completely.
Since the 3.3v power is a connector issue, I would like to suggest this be taken into account in future revisions of this product. I highly doubt this is something which can be enabled/disabled via firmware or software update.
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Do you have a link to these drives? I have tested 6x 8tb HGST UltraStar HE drives in my N100 with no issues. I have a contact at WD so would love to discuss the exact model with him.
I’ve had the same experience with HGST 12TB. (Here’s the link of what I bought.)
I only had scotch tape at home so I used that to cover the 3 pins and they are working.
But yeah, I might have expected the ZimaCube to be able to handle this, especially if other NAS can do so.
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I believe this is the new spec sheet
It lists power disable being optional in it, but it is enabled on every single one of these drives I have ever gotten…
The drives purchased:
HGST - WD Ultrastar DC HC520 HDD | HUH721212ALE600 | 12TB 7.2K SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch Helium Data Center Internal Hard Disk Drive https://a.co/d/706gUXs
Also it seems some of these https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-14Tb-512E-SATA/dp/B09YNLYMZZ?th=1 depending on when they were purchased have power disable enabled on the drives as well.
Thanks for that. Wall of info and documentation incoming from WD:
"Re pin 3 power disable - the disk array folks and OEMs wanted to be able to power off SATA HDDs through a pin on the interface in the same way that has been supported for ages on SAS HDDs. The challenge is that pin 3 on legacy SATA backplanes can sometimes be connected to a power rail which stops the HDDs from powering up. We had a few support cases where customers thought their drives were DOA when they were fine – it was just a backplane issue so we decided to only offer SATA HDDs without pin 3 power disable in the standard distribution and e-tailer channel because of this. There’s a bit of info at link below
Many OEM drives (including all SATA drives used in our own JBODs – we use it to power down HDDs to protect from extreme temps incase the AC fails in a datacenter) have the pin3 power disable feature. I think its also likely that our connected home products (external HDDs etc) have this feature too."
So like you say it’s backplane related but also the drives may be from a non standard e-tailer channel as they removed drives with pin3 power disable.
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I understand, it is also a useful feature in storage systems like NAS and DAS systems.
This is why I suggested it be addressed in the next revision of the product.
Thank you very much for your suggestions. We will carefully find the cause of the problem and try to iterate in the next version. Thank you again! 
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Any update to this feature and compatibility? I ordered these drives from Amazon, and it did not mention anything like this feature when I reviewed it before buying. I now have 6 drives that will not spin up. I will go look to see how hard it is to cover up pin 3.
It would be awesome if ZimaCube would support this feature and allow for and disable pin 3 power to allow these drives to spin up.
Hi, we have recently updated the compatibility list, hope this is useful to you.