Hardware Homebrew What would cause an external hard drive to not get enough power?

[acorns]

I have two of the original white wiis with the GameCube ports and one of them works flawlessly with my 1tb western digital external drive while the other one doesn’t seem to want to read it.

When trying to use it on the troublesome wii a pulsing clicking sound can be heard from the hard drive and it usually doesn’t make it past the hdd initialization in usb loader gx. I have made it past it once and launched a game but it black screened shortly after. I even tried using a second external hdd also from WD and it still didn’t work.

Im assuming the issue is due to lack of power since I was able to get it usb loader gx working with a 32gb flash drive with no issue. I did use the same power supply cable for both wiis so that isn’t a contributing factor. Not sure what would cause this issue to arise on this wii in particular. But I did buy it off eBay so I don’t know what it’s been through. If anyone has any ideas to point me in the right direction I would love to hear them.

 

[CoolMe]

Make sure it's plugged in port 0. Also check the usb cable and the enclosure. Use a y-cable if you have one too.

 

[Sypherone]

The Wii USB ports normaly designed to put out 500mA max. But they can give some more and there is no qualified source to determine how much really. As there are different Wii Models maybe there are different limits.

 

[leerz]

using external power or even a Y wire solves most issues

new drives use .7a or even 1a + the sata to usb overhead and the wii can only give out so much