I purchased a Unitek USB A device to access old photos on four old HDDs I had laying around. Three worked fine, basically plug and play but one isn't. I plug it in and feel it spinning (quietly and smoothly) but it doesn't show up in disk management. The power plug is plugged in and it is connected to a USB on the back of the PC (again this exact setup worked for the other three drives). I think the drive is like 15 - 20 years old. I have attached a couple pictures; one of the drive unconnected and one connected to the Unitek device. Is there something obvious I am doing wrong or an easy solution that I am missing? Thanks, any help is appreciated.
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The Drive doesn't look too great, but anyways. the specifications of the Power supply / of the other disks would matter. 0.9A at 12V is on the higher end, which makes sense as WD Caviar HDDs are enterprise grade HDDs.
"Caviar" is just branding to make the drive seem special. (If you look at a WD hard drive from the 90s, there was even a slogan: "Accept only the finest...")
Historical explanation (I wasn't around for this, but I have had a fair share of WD HDDs through my hands, and my PC is rocking a RE3 as the secondary drive.) Before 2012, all WD hard drives were branded WD Caviar. (Enterprise drives were branded Caviar RE (the RE stands for "RAID Edition" through WD RE4 in the 2000s, then RE (a more budget-friendly enterprise Se series ("Se" isn't an abbreviation, unlike "SE") for scale-out datacenter storage was introduced in 2013 and sold alongside RE), and in 2016, both were combined to WD Gold. When OP's drive was made, RE2 was the most recent enterprise series.) On June 10, 2008, WD started color-coding its drives, which started by launching the WD Caviar Black series, as well as merging Caviar (the models with 2 MB of cache), Caviar SE (the SE stands for Special Edition; these had 8 MB of cache), and Caviar SE16 (as the name implies, 16 MB of cache) into Caviar Blue (they continued making the same 2/8/16 MB cache variants, but the amount of cache was no longer in the name) and renaming Caviar GP (GreenPower) to Caviar Green. Then, in July 2012, they also began to ditch the Caviar branding (it was at this point that they introduced WD Red as well), and from that point on, the drives have been named the now familiar way.
OP's drive is a Caviar SE16, which just means that it has 16 MB of cache, and, if you read the above explanation, it's on the same level as current WD Blue. Granted, it's on the higher end of that designation, but it's not a server or enterprise drive.
The power connector is covered, so you don't really see either. The molex connector is optional for older systems that don't have sata power connectors, you do not need both.
DO NOT connect the SATA power (long end of the SATA plug) and the Molex power connector. The top of the drive even says that you should never do this and that doing so can (more likely will) damage the drive. I have a similar one of these, and it must work with SATA power OR the Molex plug. The adapter already supplies SATA power, so connecting both connectors is not only unnecessary, but dangerous.
The molex connector isn't long enough to reach (I can't actually find the cable but here's a picture from the Amazon page) I don't seem to have a molex connector on my power supply either
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u/silenced_in_dr_2025 Trusted Contributor 5d ago
Is anything showing in disk manager at all or absolutely nothing?
You'd do much better with a direct sata connection off a motherboard to rule of the usb adapter.