Small Profile High Capacity Portable Storage

[MaiPenLai]

I went shopping for a new flash drive as my 1 gig drive is just not cutting it anymore. When I realized that a 4 gig flash drive was about 1400 THB I was thinking of other higher capacity options as the 4 gig would be another stop gap measure.

Can anyone tell me if they have experience with using a laptop drive in an enclosure, say a 120-160 gig drive ? I don't mind the trade off of having something larger than a flash drive, I am always on a bike so a full sized external would be too bulky added to all the other stuff I carry each day.

I would really like to know if anyone is using this device powered by the computer you attach it to? Once you factor in having to carry a power supply it becomes a less desirable option unless I buy a couple of power supplies and leave them at work and home.

None of the computers that I use have external SATA, So I would rely on USB and preferably fire wire connections.

Please recommend a good enclosure if you can as my past experience with building my own externals is quite bad because I chose badly made enclosures.

Thanks in advance.

MPL

[cali]

I have a 160GB 5400RPM external 2.5" drive. It and the enclosure are made by Seagate and packaged ready to go (4000 baht in the US). Yes it is completely USB bus powered by a single cable and this is the sole reason I bought it. I hate dealing with cheesy AC power adapters. Those things are just not worth the hassle or mess so 3.5" / eSATA are out.

Firewire is also a poor choice because laptops do not provide any bus power. Anytime you see the small Firewire connector it means there is no power available and that you need to lug around two different types of cables. With the small connector you need to power it in another way unless you are lucky enough only to need to plug it into desktop Firewire ports that have the bigger size bus connectors with bus power.

[MaiPenLai]

Thanx cali,

After reading your post I found a locally available 160gb 2.5 made by WD form a Thai web vendor. 4880THB

I was not aware the Seagate and WD made these small form factor drives themselves.

Once again, Thank you for your help.

MPL

[autonomous_unit]

One thing to be cautious about... these bus-powered drives usually cheat as the disk requires more current than the USB bus standard allows.

Many of the housings draw more current than they are supposed to, which might work for a while if the host computer is not enforcing bus power limits (part of the USB standard is to negotiate power requirements). Eventually, the USB host might "burn out" from being overloaded, or the overload might just reduce the voltage until data corruption occurs due to disk malfunction. Some drives may not work at all in some hosts, because the host protects itself from this abuse, while others might work "forever".

I have a 2.5inch drive housing which came with a funny USB cable that has two heads to insert into the computer. One head carries the data signal plus power, and the other head just taps more power so that it can get more current to the drive than would be available over a single USB socket. I've found my 60GB Hitachi drive works more reliably when operated using this dual-tapped power, when connected to my laptop or most desktop computers. By reliable, I mean I could do large transfers for several hours, whereas there were frequent glitches where the disk "disconnected" from the OS or had unexplained disk errors after anywhere from a few minutes to an hour when operating on only one socket. I also got a cheap powered USB hub to use when running the disk at home, to reduce the stress put on the laptop's USB chipset...

Unforunately, the Y-shaped cable can only reach two host USB sockets which are quite near to one another, unless more additional extension cords are used.

[astral]

I have had numerous problems with external cases and 2.5" disks which all seem to be related

to the power limitations referred to by Autonomous Unit.

The solution is to go for the larger 3.5" disk in an external case.

[Simmo]

Hey thanks for that power explanation. I've been having some weirdness with files copied to a 2.5" external drive.