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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Do all external hard drives require a power supply with positive polarity? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by Franck_Dernoncourt@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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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?

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[–] Carnildo@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] droptableadventures@alien.top 1 points 11 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.

[–] Far_Marsupial6303@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

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

[–] grislyfind@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] metalwolf112002@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Don't worry, you just need to wait for the EU to mandate EVERYTHING run off usb-c.