I'm looking for an external USB harddrive that can
get its power from the USB 1.0 port on my laptop.
Does something like that exist? Can anyone recommend
a particular brand?

Thanks,
Anoop

"anoop" <ghanwani@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1129995226.518887.155660@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com...

Most I have seen come with two usb leads as one usb port can't provide
enough power. I've bought two from Ebay. Both fine.
Usb 1.0 will be substantially slower than if you had a usb 2 port however.

--
John Blessing

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businesses
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Appointments, Tasks and Notes

If 4 gigs is enough, go for a USB memory block.

--
Don
Vancouver, USA



"anoop" <ghanwani@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1129995226.518887.155660@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com...

My external hard drive is USB powered. The wife and I use laptops now.
When our last desktop quit working, I removed the hard drive. I went to
Comp USA and bought a hard drive case (less than $20.00) installed the
hard drive, plugged it in and it works. Very easy to do.......
Ron

John Blessing wrote:

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On 22 Oct 2005 08:33:46 -0700, "anoop" <ghanwani@gmail.com> wrote:

I can tell you that I have several notebook drives in external
enclosures, and I have tested them on several different systems. To
start with, I have some Hitachi notebook drives in "generic"
enclosures that are Firewire/USB 2.0/1.1/1.0 compatible. Those drives
work great on my ThinkPad when I use a 12" USB cable, and they work
OK on my Wife's Dell Latitude (except that it only has USB 1.1). They
work on a co-worker's Gateway with the 12" cables, but not on another
co-worker's Dell Inspiron 5100. I also have a pair of "generic" USB
2.0/1.1(/1.0?) enclosures that work on the same systems, and work on
the Inspiron 5100 with random drops. Lastly, I have a SmartDisk
FireLite enclosure/drive combination. That drive has worked on every
system I have connected it to (with my 12" USB cable). Now, to be
honest with you, the FireLite drive is the only one which would work
on my ThinkPad when I used a high quality 6' (72") USB cable, and it
still had a few random drops. Most of the others wouldn't even go far
enough to be recognized by the OS.

Based on this, I highly recommend using the SmartDisk FireLite
external drives if you need to power from the USB bus. I also
recommend that you find a source for cables of 12" or less, to reduce
the current loss due to the cable. Since you state that you have USB
1.0, I would also recommend that you consider getting a USB 2.0
PCMCIA (or CardBus) card, and then power your drive from a secondary
USB port, or from a PS/2 port on your system. The speeds for a USB
1.0 port are so painfully slow, you won't want to use it for nay
length of time.

In a 2.5" drive, you can do that, in a 3.5" drive you cannot.

Buy an inexpensive case on E-Bay (very often these are 99 cents with $10
shipping charges) and add a 2.5" hard drive of your choice.


anoop wrote:

One USB port can provide 500ma. This is the "rating" of most 2.5" hard
drives, but there are a few (mostly older units) that are rated higher.
Also, if you are using a motherboard USB port, it may be able to
provide more (sometimes MUCH more) than 500ma. In any case, the cables
with two plugs allow up to 1,000 ma (one amp) to be drawn, which is
enough for any 2.5" hard drive.

By the way, while it should work, using an external hard drive with a
USB 1.0 port (as the OP was planning to do) is going to be terribly slow.


John Blessing wrote:

"Barry Watzman" <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:435D026F.4020001@neo.rr.com...
the other one is rated at 1 Amp. They each work well off of 1 USB port
without the use of the 2 plug cables supplied with them. Go figure (:>)

Thanks for all the replies and suggestions.

I am mainly looking for something to do backups on
(about once a week) so speed is not too much of an
issue. It's just that I have USB 1.0 and I'm trying
not to deal with the clutter of an external power
supply for the device. Also, as of now, I only need
to backup a little less than 2GB of data. However,
I expect this to grow fairly quickly mostly because
of digital photographs.

I did think about getting a 6GB microdrive but
at ~$200 it seems like I would get a much better
bang for my buck with a regular USB external harddrive.

Anoop

It's very unusual to see drives rated at over 500ma these days (I have
some older drives rated higher). As I mentioned, many motherboard USB
ports can supply a LOT more than 500ma.


olfart wrote: