Hi! I have a bunch of UHD Blu-ray drives that connect over USB which I use to rip discs. I haven’t bought many recently, but I was buying a ton at the time; hundreds.
I was having trouble powering all those drives, so I thought maybe it’d be good to get one of these USB power adapters:
Little did I know, it was pushing power back into my PC and causing all sorts of problems. I just resolved those by unplugging the drives from my PC.
One drive has its own power adapter, but the other 2.5" drives use a Y-splitter USB cable. That seems to be the issue. I was wondering if anyone knows of any USB-A adapters that remove the power pins or have a better Y-cable that doesn’t allow power leakage?
I have an Asus AM4 motherboard(Prime x570-p) that has a similar problem, but it seems like it’s a very stupid thing that shouldn’t be allowed to happen. I’m not sure if it’s AM4 in general, Asus and AM4 specific, or specific boards or dev teams, so I took a long shot to ask on the off chance there might be a correlation.
I don’t really have a solution, unfortunately. My fix is to not have powered USB devices plugged into the board. The problem I encountered personally was that the board would not power off, even with all power cut, except the plugged in USB, so I’m not sure what other problems there are or how to fix any of them.
In case it helps to find a solution, in my case, it was an externally powered harddrive adapter(Sabrent) with it’s own AC adapter. Nearly RMA’d the board, thinking it had toasted it’s self.
Not sure how dangerous it would be to just tape the power and ground pins on the USB, and see if it can be used purely for data, but I’m not going to try it.
Google suggests that it could actually be power flowing back over the VVC/power line rather than ground, and I’ve seen recommendations to cut the cable when using external power sources with USB, but I am not an expert and you should not listen to my advice.
