Compounded stupidity

[xela]

The last several times I've bought external hard drive enclosures, they've come with power bricks that connected to the enclosure via a mini-DIN connector. I thought this was stupid — there are a lot of other connectors that are far less likely to slip out accidentally. But everyone seemed to have settled on it, so I shrugged, made sure to check my connectors every couple weeks, and didn't give it much more thought.

In the ongoing saga of unpacking, i just came across an external USB drive that isn't labeled. I'm pretty sure I know what's on it, but wanted to check. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten separated from it's power supply No problem, thinks I, I'll just borrow the power supply from this other drive.

Wrong: this enclosure uses 4-pin mini-DIN. The other one uses 6-pin. So someone decided to use someone else's daft idea — but just differently enough to be incompatible.

Comments

[jered]

Not only that, they could very well deliver different voltages! The connector conspiracy lives on.

A related thing I hate -- most electronics that use an external power brick use a third-party brick that has a random Chinese manufacturer name on it. Even when you have all the bricks and devices, sometimes you can't tell which brick you need for the e.g. Iomega drive.

[jered]

Oh, the easiest way to solve your problem is probably to remove the drive from the enclosure and just hook it up with a normal PATA or SATA interface.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Yeah; one of the gadgets I can't live without is a Dymo electronic labelmaker.* It comes out every time I buy something with a power-brick. Even for the (increasingly few) that come properly labeled, having a label I can read in normal light from six feet away on power-bricks is a total win.

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* Not, not, not a Brother labelmaker. Dymo uses longitudinally split backing on their label tapes — for me, this is the difference between removing the backing being an exercise in frustration and its being trivial.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

No; the easiest way is to pull it from the enclosure and use one of the enclosureless USB-SATA/PATA converters I keep around the place.