Use PiDrive cable without drive present?

[Evancelt]

Hello. I ordered a 314GB PiDrive, Pi Enclosure Box, and cable on Pi Day 2016. The Cable and Box were mailed out to me, but the PiDrive is backordered by a month due to demand. I’d love to play around with my pi, but I’d planned to use the PiDrive power cable to power the pi. End goal for PiDrive setup is a SubSonic music streaming server on LAN.

My question is: Can I use the PiDrive cable to power a Pi 2 without having the PiDrive there to plug in as well? Would the missing drive mess up the power output to the RPi using that cable?

Thanks for your feedback

[DarrenHill]

It shouldn’t hurt, but it’s also rather pointless to do so.

The power input connector on the PiDrive Cable (micro-USB) is the same as the one on the Pi itself, so unless you need the extra 20cm or so of extension then there’s no real benefit in using the PiDrive cable in such a scenario.

I would just plug the power supply directly into the Pi as normal and forgo the PiDrive cable completely for the moment.

[Evancelt]

Thanks Darren -

Oh cool, yeah I guess I didn’t really look at the cable setup much (see: http://wdlabs.wd.com/global/images/products/pi_drive_cable_kit_image01.jpg ) and thought the standalone USB cable in the setup was USB A sized on both ends. I’ll just leave the combined cable out of the chain for now.

[DarrenHill]

I don’t need to look, I have one

The cable has 4 ends, micro USB power input, a micro USB 3 for the drive connection, a normal USB for the data out to the Pi and a micro USB power out to power the Pi.

It can be used as intended to provide power to both items and a data connection between them, or alternatively simply as a data cable (with both micro USBs disconnected) or it could be used as a power cable extension (with only the micro USBs used) but that would be a little odd.

For its designed full use though it’s a nice handy little item that I recommend.