Electronics help needed

[Guest therafiman]

I have a USB hard drive that has problems with my laptop because it doesn't receive enough current. I've seen usb y-cables online to take the power from a second socket and add it to the first - but I have enough USB->mini USB cables lying around (and I have no problems soldering) so I figured I'd make my own. This is the plan (top pic is the cable you can buy):

Is there anyone that can confirm this is the right way to do it? I don't fancy frying a brand new drive.

[Guest awarner (MVP)]

That's basically all you need to do, just make sure you connect the correct terminals.

You could always try blagging a cable from the hdd manufacturer, my father was given one free after he had the same issues.

[Guest wakei456]

can it work well?

[Guest awarner (MVP)]

As long as the usb ports do not share the same power then yes it can work.

My laptop works well with this sort of cable set up but my media centre pc does not, and any heavy data transfers usually end up with corrupted data on the media centre pc.

[Guest therafiman]

I did it, and it works perfectly. Didn't at first though - I used a USB extension instead of the original cable and when joined it was too long to work, my drive seems quite picky about cable length. Once i shortened it though it was fine, no more stupid power surge errors.