On Fri, 22 May 2020, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
Ha!
I have an old external 3.5" IDE disk enclosure. It's a good enclosure,
too -- Firewire 800 _and_ USB 2 _and_ eSATA. It has the internal drive
from my old iMac G5 in it. The iMac suffered from failing capacitors
and I coaxed a little more life from it by making its HD external.
I wish to retrieve its contents.
It has a very odd power connector. It's a DIN plug with quite a few
pins -- 7 or 8 and a plastic locator. Unique PSU.
As I have been on mandatory working-from-home for a couple of months,
I took my Mac mini setup in the bedroom apart and stashed the bits
away, and set up
my work laptop with 2 old external screens as a home office. One
ancient Eizo screen and a slightly more modern HDMI one.
Snag: I failed to pack the modern HDMI screen's PSU brick away with it.
This led to a lot of frantic hunting. I found the power brick, and some others.
The snag is this. I now have _two_ power bricks for the external
drive. Both deliver the requisite *both* 12V and 5V. Both have the
right DIN plug and fit.
But they're wired differently. One's ground pins are the other's 12V pins.
I think this is now resolved but it was an interesting question: one
brick will power the drive, while the other, with an identical
connector, is more or less guaranteed to release the magic smoke from
the external enclosure.
Similarly, I have a few 3.25" drives. NO, not 3.5"; not 3.0". 3.25" was
the entry in the "shirt pocket disk" wars that Dysan bet the company on.
(remember their disks?) Another discussion.
OB_Tangent: Georgre Morrow said that the solution would be to cut a deal
with clothing manufacturers to make shirt pockets 5.25" or even 8"
3.0" drives (Amdek, Amstrad, etc.) use same connectors as "standard"
5.25", with "molex" power connector (I don't know what the CORRECT name is
for that connector).
But, I have some 3.25" drives that use same connectors as "standard" 3.5"
drives, ("4 pin Berg"?) EXCEPT 5V and 12V are swapped in their positions
in the coneectors!
