USB cable and strange behavior with disk in enclosure...

I think one of disks in USB disk enclosure I had just got broken because of faulty, or something, USB cable. Now, I don't know how it is possible, nor what exactly happened, but I have a strong feeling that I'm right. Namely, what happened is that when I plugged the cable into the enclosure I heard strange sounds, like the heads are trying to move but are being retracted back to initial position; a series of clicks, about a second apart. That happened almost every time I used that cable. At first, I thought that the problem is that the USB ports are USB3.0 while enclosure is USB2.0 and something is wrong with currents or who know what. But googling didn't turned anything about that. Then, I tried another one and disk worked normally. WTF?!

Well, I found out that when power source isn't strong enough the symptoms are clicking that's heard in the disk. In that case you should unplug the disk as soon as possible. Also, you probably received additional cable with a caddy that will allow you to solve this problem. What happened in my case, probably, is that the cable is somehow faulty and probably decreased current so that disk didn't have enough power.

Power supplies...

Have you ever asked yourself how the power supply within you computer works? How complicated it is? Or how did it develop? I never did. For me, it was a black box that takes 220V (or 110V, depending where you live) on input and produces 12V/5V on output. Basically, you don't notice that they exist, but now and then you have some problems caused by them, e.g. when they fail, or when they are not powerful enough.

Today I stumbled on this article about power supplies. I have to say that it is well research article about modern power supplies. It was motivated by Steve Jobs' claim that the power supply within Apple ][ was revolutionary and that the guy that designed it, Rod Holt, didn't get a credit for it. So, the blog's author did an extensive research and found out that Jobs wasn't right. Anyway, I recommend that you read that post, it's very good with a lots of references.

It's interesting how I came accross that post. Initially I stumbled upon a post on Hacker News about some guy that left Google and this Guy explains why. Now, there are different opinions about this topic and maybe I write about it in the future, in the mean time, I found this post about power supplies to be rather interesting.

One more thing. That guy that wrote post about power supplies also wrote a post about iPhone USB charger that he bought cheaply in eBay. What's interesting is that this charger almost certainly doesn't follow safety regulations which means that you can suffer electrical shock. So, don't save money on something that can endanger your life!