Thread: laptop external hard drive question

Originally Posted by Kato

Hi.

I'm using a thinkpad 390e as my pc. Its currently running off an inverter and working pretty good. Now I want to add an external hard-drive and an external dvd rom. My question is about powering the hard drive and the usb dvd player. The self powered ( usb powered ) drives are more expensive so I would like to buy an external hard-drive, which would mean that i would need to power it somehow. From what i've read so far, the inverter alone won't be able to do it ( or will it ? ). What are my other options to power the external units...I'm already splitting my cig adapter to run the lilliput and the inverter.

It varies a lot. Many of the external drives use an external power brick that connects to the drive using a 6 pin mini-din cable (like a ps/2 keyboard cable but with six pins). In the enclose I had two pins are ground, two pins are 12v and 2 pins are 5v. I wired a cable to connect a molex connector to the appropriate pins. Infortunately I wired it wrong and fried the hard drive in the enclosure. So, go very careful.

If you can find one with a regular single voltage barrel connector then you can get a radioshack dc-dc adapter to run it on.

yes, I could do that, but i was wondering if running a single inverter through the cig. lighter ( with an extension cord to connect the external hard-drive) would provide enough power for the lilliput, laptop and external hard drive....or DVD in future.

How many watts would the inverter have to be to allow all those peripherals to run.

Are you saying that its better to run a dc-dc adapter ( from radioshack ) and hook that up directly to the hard-drive?

In that case, wouldn't i need a separate dc-dc adapter for each device....i.e one for Hard-drive and one for external dvd