I just bought the X9s, but it arrived with the side ports misaligned. I ordered a replacement unit, and it arrived with the ports properly aligned. I haven't shipped the old one back yet, and as I was packing it up, I noticed the power supplies are slightly different between the two units. Both look identical, until you look at the back sticker on the power brick: Model: CS-1202000 Input: 100-240v 1.5A max 50/60Hz Output: 12V 2A Model: CS-1203000 Input: 100-240v 1.5A max 50/60Hz Output: 12V 3A One outputs 2A and one outputs 3A. I'm confused. Is one power supply better than the other? Is there any advantage of the 3A over the 2A? Why do they have different power supplies?
If you really attach a SATA Externally via the connector then a 2A PSU is barely enough. It will not allow Eject and a New HDD attachment without a power-cycle as the power-on power-surge will make the box boot. So yes 3A is better. I am using Earthed 12V 4A PSU's with all my players myself. Works great. They try to safe money on the PSU which is a bad idea but understandable seen the stiff competition on price.
Thanks for the reply. Well I'm obviously going to keep the 3A one since one has to go back and they sent me one of each. It's a shame they went cheap with the power supply since this is marketed as a premium player. And since it even includes the SATA cable, it's assumed the player can handle an external SATA drive comfortably with the included power adapter without straining the power supply. Out of curiosity, would a SATA SSD draw less power than a traditional spinning HDD? Would that go easier on the box?
Yes it would, you find the power consumption on the specifications pages and mostly also on the device itself. SSD is very expensive though to use for storage and has no performance improvement over a HDD. Using a 2.5 inch will do a far better job for that purpose. In fact if somebody found a 2.5 inch ==> 3.5 bracket/cartridge which can be used for insertion into media player bays it would be nice if it could be shared. Finding a bracket is easy but these all result in the SATA+Power connector to be in the wrong place.
My experience is a yes and no on the SSD vs HDD power draw......When writing to the SSD, my SAMSUNG 1TB SSD draws 1.8A at 5V, others are around 1.5A, question is the power rating on the box's 12V to 5V converter, I don't know how many amps it can provide total to run the box plus any USB attachments. If you are just reading from the SSD, then the issue may not be there. As a comparision to the recent Seagate 4TB drives on the market, they draw 0.35A 12V, 0.5A 5V, but they are subject to mechanical wear and tear, spindle noise. I am a gadget freak, I tend to attach boat loads of gadgets to the TV, so I got myself a 12V 6A supply from ebay for under $10, breakout the supply output to power multiple 12V devices such as a HDD docking station, and a 5V 5A 4 port USB step down converter to power my network switch and other android devices that runs off 5V, such as the H6-Pro. I don't have a wiring mess from the wall plug.
Thanks for the feedback, guys. Hmm, I wonder now if I would be better finding a 2.5" sata drive to connect. I have the X9s, so I'd have to find someplace to put the hdd though. Do they make a simple inexpensive rack to hold a single 2.5" hdd for connecting to media players? I was planning on just using a USB 3.0 thumb drive, as I mostly just pile a bunch of stuff on my thumb drive to watch, then delete afterwards. I archive all my stuff on other drives. So a thumb drive would serve me the basic purpose of dropping files onto it to view. But a 2.5" hdd would give me lots of extra room to store stuff temporarily without constantly deleting stuff to make room.
