![]() Here is a pin diagram of a SATA conector. ![]() In electrical work, this is known as ganging. Because hard drives can pull up to 6A of power on the 5V rail (which exceeds the current-carrying capacity of any single 28-gauge wire), each 18 gauge wire on the Molex connector is crimped to three of the 28 gauge wires on the SATA connector so that the current load is spread out over them. SATA power connectors use 28AWG wires, which can carry only 1.5A of current each. Either way, that's a short circuit, and it's quite possible that not even a drop of power actually made it to the hard drive.Ī standard PC AMP (Molex) power connector uses 18AWG wires, which can carry up to 10A of current each. The SATA connector was either not crimped properly to the wires, or the components in the brick itself were not soldered correctly. The hard drive is probably OK, but of course there are no guarantees here whatsover. This is why the ground pins are in the center - they're still ground no matter what way the connector goes in. Even though the connectors are designed to not allow a backwards connection, the circuits themselves are still designed to handle the situation if someone somehow manages to do it. This is standard practice on most low-voltage electronic equipment. It should be noted that hard drive circuity has safety resistors on it to protect the logic board should there be an over-volt condition on the power connector. Simply plugging the cable in backwards would not cause what you observed (although it isn't exactly good for the drive). I found conflicting answers on the Internet: this link says that it shouldn't kill the hard drive but this said it should.Īs I have no alternative power supply I can't check it right now (if there is another way to check if it's fine please post it). When I shake the power supply I hear a rattling sound (similar to what you hear when you shake a burned out light bulb) - is it a sign that the power supply exploded first and it saved my hard drive? Could this kill my hard drive? There wasn't any smell coming from the hard drive but I'm not sure that it wasn't fried. The power supply exploded (the enclosure is fine but it sparked) when I plugged it in, probably because it was plugged in the wrong way. It still requires external power supply so I used an adapter that came with this kit but I plugged it the wrong way - the molex cable has four wires - one yellow, two black and one red and they are labeled 1, 2, 3, 4. ![]() I bought a cheap kit allowing me to use a 3.5 SATA hard drive with a laptop, by plugging it in with USB.
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