Do all external hard drives require a power supply with positive polarity?
Do all external hard drives require a power supply with positive polarity?
I am shopping for an AC/DC power adapter for an external hard drive, and I've noticed that the power supply required for the couple of the external hard drives I looked at is always with positive polarity. This made me wonder: Do all external hard drives require a power supply with positive polarity?
It was a long time ago, but I had some Seagate externals that were the reverse.
There's no official standard, but "center-positive" is far more common than "center-negative" for power supply connectors.
There's also drives with a 4-pin DIN connector for 5 and 12v. And there's no standard for which side 5 and 12 are on.
Have killed a disk using the wrong power brick. And it had some data on it I had nowhere else.
Got the data back years later when I bought another similar drive and board swapped them - but this was in the era of 750GB drives where you could do that and it'd actually work.
I've never seen one that wasn't like that. 9V supplies usually have the opposite polarity, and there's 12V AC supplies too. I tag the plugs so I don't fry my hardware. And I pray that some standards organization will do something.
Don't worry, you just need to wait for the EU to mandate EVERYTHING run off usb-c.