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?
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.
It was a long time ago, but I had some Seagate externals that were the reverse.
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.