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I want to connect a 3.5" drive to an eSATA port. My HTPC happens to have a mainboard (some years old, ASROCK A330 ion) with 2 powered eSATA ports. From what I found out it has no extra pins (how-to-check-if-my-esatap-port-provides-12v-power) for 12V and I also have a cable from like this (example image) without 12V pins. The cable says for 2.5" drives what fits to the lack of 12V pins.
But my 3.5" drive supports both (example image), 5V (0.70A) and 12V (0.55A).
Can I connect the drive to that port?
Also I didn't found any specifications about how many Amperes that port offers so is there any danger that the drive will request more Amperes and kill the port/board or even the power supply?
Jens
Posted 2016-04-10T13:42:25.220
Reputation: 1
It won't work, your drive doesn't support both, it REQUIRES both 5V and 12V... if you want to connect a 3.5" drive to your eSATA connections, you will need an external power supply (or enclosure with power) of some kind. If you found some step up transformer, you would need to draw over 2A of 5vDC (0.7A for 5V rail, and 1.32A@5V to stepup to 12V, minimum) on that eSATA line to power the drive, which I would think would be too much for the SATA controller chipset of the board and it would fry it out. – acejavelin – 2016-04-10T14:14:29.820
Oh ok, then this was a misunderstanding by me. Thank you. :) – Jens – 2016-04-10T14:19:38.277