RE: Tar Dead
as title
Western Digital has released a Mac-friendly version of its My Passport Studio portable external hard drive, fitting the unit with a Firewire 400 port and pre-formatting it with Mac OS X's HFS+ file system. Sure to please Mac fans? Well, possibly not. While WD was quick to tout the external drive's ability to be powered by the …
Might well get a USB only one and save a few quid.
I've been switching to these small drives lately, since ditching the desktop. I'd be quite happy to pay a bit extra for firewire, but no point if it means having USB too.
Recently got a Toshiba USB that needs the juice from two USB ports. Seems to work well enough off one though (at least on the left side of the MBP, though not on the right side).
That's simply because 2.5" drives should beable to be powered from USB ports, but in some case's there just isn't neough power, specially in certain laptops. Dell are (or were, not sure now?) bad for this.
I had one that couldn't power 2.5" drives... what sucks, is I have a cable with 2 usb ends, but only 1 usb port!
The above, sounds like lazy/cheap manufacturing to me.
I have a portable Iomega HD which is equally happy being powered by the Firewire port, a single USB port when plugged into a USB 2.0 port, two ports on the off chance that you need to plug it into a USB 1.1 port, or a 5V DC power adapter.
It also came with all those cables in the box, unlike my recently-acquired Epson printer which came with a power lead but no USB cable. Thinking it was a mistake, I looked at the bit of paper showing the package contents, and sure enough there was no USB cable shown.