Wed 13 Feb 2008
I bought one of those ”Kill a watt” watt meters a couple of years ago and I find myself constantly measuring what different electric devices consume. Did you know for example that a first generation XBOX consumes 11 watt in suspend mode?
Or that a fully loaded Amiga 4000 with PPC and PPC graphics board idles at 100 watt?
I know that the device is not 100% accurate but even if it was 75% accurate I still think it was well worth its price.
So today I got the itch to find out how much watt my GVP HD8+ external SCSI controller and memory expansion for my Amiga 500 was consuming. I switched it on and looked at the LCD which showed 4 watt. But the hard drive was not spinning up.
So I thought it was some kind of termination problem which I had last Sunday when I was playing around with my A500 equipment but it was not as I looked closer on the hard drive. After half an hour I found out that some of the stiff cables that runs to the Molex connector supplying power to the hard drive had broken off and was only attached by the plastic housing to the Molex.
A quick test with my Amiga-tester PC ATX power supply (modified with Amiga PSU plug and on-signal) proved that the hard drive controller was indeed working and the only problem was a silly cable.
It is funny once you run into a hardware problem with you Amiga equipment, suddenly the itch to put the whole lot on eBay sounds so much nicer, but once you fix a problem it feels great and you do not want to sell anything.
Anyway, tomorrow I am going to solder some softer cables in the GVP HD8+ external hard drive so that a hard drive swap will not break the power cables.
By the way, the GVP hard drive is very beautiful, it flows nice along the lines of the Amiga 500, and it even has the same color plastic and same styling as the A500