[BC] Re: Portable Hard Drives

[Sam Roffe]

My success with external USB hard drives has been pretty dismal.  They
often require more current than what a USB port can give, my
experience. Others have had acceptable results, what ever that may be.
 A suitable wall wart is a much better power supply than a just
pulling the current off the USB port.  If I have to use a USB drive,
I'll plug it into a powered USB port.  Spare the computer, since I'm
using mostly laptops anyway.

I like the Serial ATA drive solution.  You can get an external
enclosure and a cable that extends the internal SATA interface to the
outside world.  In my case, I have a SATA PC express card for my
laptop, and plug in a external SATA drive to it.  It's also much
faster than a USB interface.  I still power the drive with an external
power supply.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 9:43 AM, <RichardBJohnson at comcast.net> wrote:
> Warning: External USB and Firewire drives are usually the cheapest, crapiest IDE drives with a power supply and protocol converter board. The power supplies are generally wall-warts nowadays, and the protocol converter boards are built to the lowest possible cost, meaning that their lifetime is even shorter than the drives.
>

-- 
Sam Roffe