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?

  • Carnildo@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    There’s no official standard, but “center-positive” is far more common than “center-negative” for power supply connectors.

    • droptableadventures@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.