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Just lost another HD. are docking stations to blame?

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Sakura90:
Interesting topic. What can I add.... well, I always hot-swap and use drives externally. With my first storage drive I got a Vantec enclosure with eSATA. But as the number of drives increased, I ended up getting a Startech dock for 2 drives. I went with Startech only because the dock provided separate eSATA ports for the drives, the ones from Thermaltake and other generic ones I saw had only one eSATA output for the 2 drives, and I didn't like that :P

So far so excellent I could say. Been using this dock for 6 months with 5 different drives, which I regularly swap in and out, storing them in nice Betamax cases when not in use (they are great and very sturdy, as expected from something Japanese ;D). The power brick that came with this Startech dock has 5v and 12v lines, 3A each.

One thing to note, the power grid in this attempt-of-a-country is rather bad, the wall voltage is usually a tad lower than 220v (in summer it can go as low as 170-180, or even lower to the point of not being usable), with frequent surges and occasional power outages (again, more common in summer). Yet I never had a single drive failing or a byte lost/corrupted. I don't know much about power bricks, but this even has a nice hold-up time (or so it seems). With sudden surges when the lights clearly flicker, the drives keep running smoothly. When I had the Vantec enclosure, with those surges you could hear the drive "starting" again.

Anyway, I never had a single prob with this dock, even with lots of hot-swapping. If you let me, I'd like to ask something. Even if I haven't had probs, the instability of the power grid here always worried me. I can't get any expensive equipment as my currency is useless, imports are restricted and even getting money out of this stupid country is complicated. The bare minimum I could do is running the dock from the PSU.

I once did that with the Vantec enclosure (once I noted the drive "restarted" with certain surges), it had a normal plug for 12v, like this



I just wired the yellow and black from a molex and attached a plug at the other end. Easy. It ended up looking like this



But this crappy dock has a 6-pin mini-din



4-6 are ground, 1-2 are 12v and 3-5 are 5v. How can I connect that to my PSU? Only way I see is get a spare connector and cram inside yellow, red and black from a molex (split in two). But that would need soldering I guess... and I'll surely mess up with 6 stupid wires in a plug :-\

As I said, I have to go with the cheapest of solutions, as hardware availability here is low and importing/buying stuff in USD is a pain.

nstgc:
What I decided to do (since I have cabling problems due to an upside down PSU) is use the spare parts I have laying around to build a secondary computer and use it as a sort of NAS with a cross over cable. Effectively it will be a big ass external enclosure.

bork:
You forgot the instructions on how to turn the PS on without a motherboard attached.

Find the green wire on the motherboard connector and jumper it with a wire to ether of the black wires just next to it.

----

Additional after a few minutes of thought:
Because there are those that do not think before acting --  make sure the power cord is removed from the PS and is placed on the other side of the room first.  Do not want anyone playing arc welder by trying to connect the wrong wires ether; The PS might rebel and launch a fire ball into your face, the cheaper PS might not have good over-current protection.

AnimeJanai:

--- Quote from: datora on April 27, 2012, 11:42:52 PM ---It looks like you read what I wrote backwards.  I specifically described house current --> high quality surge suppressor --> battery back-up (where I used APC as an example brand name) --> critical electronics (main computing system, external hard drives, router & switches).

--- End quote ---

No, I meant it as I said it.  It was posted as a caution to not put one of the higher quality surge suppressors after the UPS.  Low quality surge suppressors that have only MOV and capacitors are fine.  It's the high-quality ones with coils that cause the problem. 

bork:
On a ups that does not have a  sinusoidal waveform, a good surge protector will see squarish wave form as a surge and try to ground it. 

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