The reason for the external power to hardrives is that they are often designed to use more power than the USB spec allows so they come with an AC adapter (or a double headed cable) to draw from. In fact, many people run without it connected. Thanks for your post regarding PCI-e USB3.0 card and your HP ML 110 G5 Server.ДЇirst, the good newsвЂ¦ even though our PCI-e USB 3.0 card has a molex connector to connect to the power supply, weвЂ™ve never run across a case where itвЂ™s necessary. Thanks for the additional info, let me know what you find, The PCI-e bus is able to provide enough power to the card to cover the 900mA per port so I suspect the Tape Drive unit is pulling more than this ammount.Д¬an you say which operating system you have and which power supplies your Power Edge Servers have? You maybe able to use a splitter on your power connectors to get power to the card, but itвЂ™s not likely to stop the over current messages. Make sure you are using a USB 3.0 cable, as a 2.0 cable will cause the system to negotiate down to the USB 2.0 spec and the OS will then expect 500mA, max. USB 3.0 allows 900mA per port and a self powered device shouldnвЂ™t be pulling more than that. We havenвЂ™t seen an issue like this or USB 3.0 tape drives in the past so working in parallel with the Tape Drive manufacturer may be useful. ItвЂ™s unusual for a device to trigger over current messages on our PCI-e card, especially when itвЂ™s self powered.

Thanks for posting your question, weвЂ™ll be happy to help.

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