[brf4n]

I bought a generic 3.5" enclosure to use with my 80 gig Seagate hard drive. I'm having problems though. The power light only comes on when only one of the two plugs is in. If the data is in and the power is out, then the light goes on. Data out, power in, then the light goes on. But having both the Ata cable and power cable in, the power light goes off. Any reason why this would happen? The hard drive works fine, and I'm thinking it's the motherboard of the 3.5" enclosure, but I'd really like to be sure that there are absolutely no fixes I can do myself before I send this back in.

Thanks

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The device can get power from the USB connection or it can get power from an external source. It seems like the device that you got has a problem with using the external power. I had such a problem with a USB hub on a Compaq computer. It would not work with the external power and without the external power there was not enough power for the device. I returned the power supply and move the device to another machine.

You might see if there are any jumpers which can be set to only use external power.

If the drive works off the USB power, then you could try that and not worry about the external power, but personally I prefer to power disks in USB enclosures by external power, but it is not always required.

[Kemasa]

The device can get power from the USB connection or it can get power from an external source. It seems like the device that you got has a problem with using the external power. I had such a problem with a USB hub on a Compaq computer. It would not work with the external power and without the external power there was not enough power for the device. I returned the power supply and move the device to another machine.

You might see if there are any jumpers which can be set to only use external power.

If the drive works off the USB power, then you could try that and not worry about the external power, but personally I prefer to power disks in USB enclosures by external power, but it is not always required.

[brf4n]

Weirdest thing happened, I tried using it again and it started working. But then after an hour of copying my files over it said that the I/O had timed out or something like that and the drive turned itself off. I definately think it's the board. Does this sound familiar to anyone else?