The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/ET2-SW on 2025-02-23 18:14:57.
I just bought a dual hard drive caddy as I need to inventory all my drives, and determine which are the most useful for a new NAS build. It's a mess down here. I've probably got 30 drives laying around from 500g to 18TB.
I have a smattering of shucked and data center drives that also need evaluation. I was never a fan of the Kapton tape method, so I made some hardware level changes that were useful, but not for this.
So the new dual caddy was intended to replace a single drive Xigmatek USB caddy I've had for years. My intention was to permanently modify it to work with datacenter drives.
After tearing it apart, I realized that SATA pin 3 was never connected anyway. Sure enough, I put it all back together and drop a data center drive in, and windows found it right away. No modifications needed.
TLDR: Xigmatek external USB caddies apparently work just fine with unmodified data center drives. Also. I've seen this same caddy sold under other brands, I'm sure you have, too. Try it first, worst case it just won't work.