3 pin hard drive power connector mystery solved

[lroop]

I recently helped a friend track down the mating 3 pin connector for the odd power connector some X68000s use for the hard drive.  He suggested I post here to share this piece of information.  It's still manufactured and also pretty cheap.  It's an AMP EI series (EI stands for "Economy Interconnect" if anyone cares), AMP part number 172211-3.   You'll also need three of the contact pins that go inside it (or just two if you're using something that only requires 5 volts and GND, no 12V), the AMP part number for those is 170376-2.  In the U.S., these are both available from Digi-Key, the housing is 25 cents in quantity 1, and the pins are 12 cents each in quantity 1, so 61 cents all together.  Unfortunately that doesn't include shipping (probably another $2-3 for just the connector parts by USPS mail) but if you need other electronics parts like capacitors the savings add up quickly (not to mention most coin cell batteries like CR-2032s and 2025s are really cheap there, and they even have the ones with solder tabs that will solder right into old game cartridges with game save SRAM).

Ideally, you'd want to have a crimp tool as well.  The ones for this type of pin can get pricey, but the red-handled one that Molex sells (Molex 63811-1000) and includes in some of their connector kits will work fine.  You may be able to get away with just mashing the crimp area on the pins with pliers but if you go that route you should probably solder the wires to the pins so they can't come loose and short out.

I could potentially make cables for people if there's interest.  I have parts to make 8 or 9 more cables right now, I'd probably want something like $5 + cost of shipping for an X68000 3 pin to 4-pin Molex (the connector commonly found on hard drives before SATA) or 4-pin floppy (the connector commonly seen on 3.5" PC disk drives that looks like the X68k connector but has 1 more pin).