Those can be hit or miss. I have a spare USB Y power cable to improve the odds.
Bob
I had this problem like 2 weeks ago. I plugged in HDD in PS3 and it got recognized for a short time and then it disappeared. I tried other HDDs in PS3 and they all suddenly had that problem. These are external and I use enclosure so it has a USB cable and gets power from another cable. They all worked fine. Last time I had this problem none of HDDs worked on my PC and 2 laptops. Then I formatted partition C: on my PC and plugged in HDD and they all started working on all devices. What could be the problem that caused this again? And what made them work just by plugging in PC with recently formatted partition?

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