Anyone Good With Electronics?

Playdo

My WD external hard drive is playing up on me and I need some quick advice. Basically there's no power getting to the hard drive.

It powers from the mains and goes through an AC adaptor. If I detach the cable (from the AC adapor to the hard drive) the light on the AC adaptor stays lit. As soon as I plug it into the hard drive the light goes out.

Whereabouts is the fault likely to be? Thanks

Piflik

Might be a short circuit in the HD or HD Case causing a circuit braker in your AC Adaptor to angage to protect the Hardware...

Playdo

It's a common issue with this hard drive. I've removed the hard drive and I'm trying to connect it straight to the pc as it's so important that I get the data back soon.

Does anyone know how to do this exactly? From what I gather I need to connect it via a SATA cable. I've got three SATA ports in the PC, each with a cable coming out of, one to the internal hard drive, one to the DVD drive and the last to an eSATA port on top of the tower. (There is also an empty GSATA port). All the ports are 9-pin and the leads coming out are going into 9-pin too (into the dvd etc.)

On the ext. hard drive there are two SATA connections (9-pin + 15-pin).

Do I need to connect both of these using a Y adaptor to go to the 9-pin port in the PC?

What about the power supply, will this come from the SATA port?

Help please.

Update: Ok, there's a 15-pin SATA connector coming from the PSU into the DVD drive and the DVD also has a 9-pin going to the SATA port. Can I then simply replace the DVD drive with the external hard drive? Would there be any power differences that could damage anything?

cw

Playdo wrote: »

Update: Ok, there's a 15-pin SATA connector coming from the PSU into the DVD drive and the DVD also has a 9-pin going to the SATA port. Can I then simply replace the DVD drive with the external hard drive? Would there be any power differences that could damage anything?

I think sata is sata is sata, I've done this before and nothing exploded, but that's just my experience, i dont have the details!

The Flying Monk

Inside the external will just be a standard SATA hard drive. You can easily just plug this into your PC in place of your DVD drive.

Your mainboard probably has more than 3 SATA ports on it, so if you can find some extra cables you can plug it in without sacrificing your ability to play DVD's. You may need one of these for the power if you don't have any extra SATA power leads

EarthQuake

DVDs and HDs use the same SATA connections, both power and data cables, so yeah you can just swap it out.

Playdo

Great the hard drive's showing up and I can rescue my data. Not going to buy another WD again. Think I'll look into raid drives. Thanks people.

EarthQuake

I think the nature of external HD's and how they are used causes them to be prone to failure, unless of course your HD has sat in one spot and never been moved for its entire lifetime, you can pretty much expect an external HD of any brand to fail sooner than one that sits in your PC.

People always say after a hd dies that "I'll never buy such and such again" but i think most major HD manufacturers all have problems.

Playdo

it's been sat in one spot and hasn't moved an inch. Had it for about a year and a half, stays on when I use the PC in the day and is switched off at night. I didn't check out the reviews before buying it and there are a lot of similar problems.

Other than movement, I guess there's no difference in reliability between an external and internal HD? What's the best solution for a stationary 250-500gb hard drive that isn't TOO expensive?

EarthQuake

Well with external drives you get heat related(i would imagine atleast) issues being packed so tightly into a little box, if you aren't ever going to deal with moving it around, you should just go with an internal drive, possibly an internal raid setup.

Then just get a cheap USB HD or a larger capacity flash drive from the times when you really do need to move your data from one location to another.

I have a 500GB WD drive that i would take to and from work regularly, have had it for about 3 years and its still works the same, i'm honestly surprised i've never had any issues with it for the amount of abuse it has taken... I generally dont keep anything important stuff on this drive. I guess model to model they probably vary quite a bit in reliability, so reading reviews is essential.

Playdo

It's not the silver elements model with the rubber ends is it? I'll look into the internal raid setup.

EarthQuake

red(generally) cable, black ends = data cable

black ended cable with lots of slots etc = sata power cable(shown is a converter from molex to sata)

4 pin gray(generally) cable = molex power cable

Some sata drives actually have the sata power cables AND molex, or JUST molex. Just make sure that you do not plug in both a sata power and molex cable at the same time and you'll be good.

Mark Dygert

External platter drives are a bad idea, just too many physical pieces that can go wonky. SSD on the other hand, rock F-in solid. You can toss it off a bridge, run it over with a tank and still pull data off of it.

haiddasalami

Vig wrote: »

External platter drives are a bad idea, just too many physical pieces that can go wonky. SSD on the other hand, rock F-in solid. You can toss it off a bridge, run it over with a tank and still pull data off of it.

Hmm gimme a second while a purchase a tank to run over my SSD XD