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Portable Power Supply Error

U

upriverpaddler

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 11, 2004
Messages
1,701
I bought an IDE to USB converter with a power supply. The power supply wouldn't spin up my hard drive. Tested the connector, and was getting +12v and +5v but only one ground pin between the two..

So.... I cut the connector off, and found only three wires. So I split the ground to the two center pins on the molex for a ground for each circuit. Tested each circuit with my multimeter and am getting the proper voltages. (Triple checked which side gets which voltage.)

The drive still wont spin up. It did spin up before with the ATX power supply, and it did spin up after with the ATX power supply.

Can the different DC voltage circuits use the same ground?

What am I missing? Thanks in advance for your consideration.
 
What's the current rating on that power supply that you have?
It's very likely that the ps can't provide enough current for the HD to spin.

A Google spec says that one IDE HD draws:
5V/200mA, and 12V/500mA, total of 700mA or 0.7A
So, as long as your power supply could provide at least >1A, it should have enough power to start your HD.

On the circuit board, ground is the same everywhere.
I would not mix two different power supplies and mix two grounds together,
unless two power supplies are the same brand and specs and you want to connect them to
either series or parallel connection
 
This morning I checked and found that the two grounds are common to each other on the drive itself, so my cutting was not necessary. But I was hoping to run two drives with it eventually anyway.

The brick has a sticker that says each circuit is good for 1.5 amps. I'm gonna have to figure out hot to test for this today.
 
:eek: 1.5A???? that's enough for maybe a 4" ccfl. nothing bigger.

you could run about 35 lazer led's on each circuit tho.
 
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