Has anyone seen a tester for the power bricks (supplies) that often are used to power external hard drives through a connector that looks like (maybe is exactly) a PS/2 keyboard/mouse connector, and supplies both 12V and 5V on separate contacts? A Google search on "power brick tester" doesn't seem to yield much interesting.
I'm more interested in finding out how the voltages appear on the pinout than what the current capacity of the device may be. I don't even find a standard for the pinout, so if a power supply fails, I'm afraid to simply try another one, as it might put 12V on the contact that was expecting 5V, or reverse the expected polarity. Getting a replacement power supply for a legacy external hard drive or other device seems impossible, but, if the pinout is correct, a "generic" external power supply should work if it has adequate current capacity. I'm almost tempted to try to make my own, but that would be a lot of work. If I could, I would purchase only external drive cases that had a single connector for 12V (and produced 5V from the 12V internal to the case. Then any 12V supply would do, although on might have to put the proper single-voltage (generally concentric) connector on the cable. That would be easy, taking the connector from the dead power supply. Fred Holmes ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
