Are USB powered external HDD OK?

agrinnall

Strider590 wrote: »

2.5" HDD are much sturdier than 3.5", they're better equipped to handle the sort of abuse they're subjected to in a laptop. From being dropped, to exposure to higher than normal temperatures.

Tell that to the ruined disk that I dropped :mad:. I now buy Storejet drives with rubberised casing to provide more shock protection.

londonTiger

pappa_golf wrote: »

m.2 card with adaptor rules , low currant , shockproof , but flippin expensive!

pointless. USB speed bottleneck makes running an m.2 like this complete waste of money.

pappa_golf

however they use very little currant , and are shockproof , nothing pointless about those 2 aspects . so whilst we are talking about the topic that was mentioned in the OPs first post , can you suggest better?

prowla

There are (as I've just found out) two types of USB drives:
(a) ones which house a standard SATA drive and have a USB converter in the enclosure,
(b) ones which run USB native on the drive's logic board.

The second type can be slightly smaller (and cheaper), as there's no need for any extra circuitry in the enclosure at all.

However, the downsides are that you can't take the drive out and put it directly into a computer, and if it fails you can't replace it with a spare SATA drive.


On the reliability question, I'm with previous comments that you would expect a 2.5" drive to be more robust than a 3.5" one, because it is designed for being moved about. However, beware of blanket statements like that, as it may vary across models (and I don't know about the USB-native ones).


It is highly probable that a USB powered drive will consume less power than one which requires an external power supply, but I'm not sure whether the difference would amount to anything significant.

But that aside, just having to plug in one cable from drive to computer is surely more convenient than that cable plus a wall-wart.


It might also be worth considering a Wi-Fi based NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit, which does need to be mains powered but can be mounted on the computer as a network share rather than plugging in directly.

They do tend to cost a bit more, but some can be had for reasonable money.

Hermione_Granger

pappa_golf wrote: »

however they use very little currant , and are shockproof

But how many raisins do they use?

pappa_golf

not a lot

londonTiger

pappa_golf wrote: »

however they use very little currant , and are shockproof , nothing pointless about those 2 aspects . so whilst we are talking about the topic that was mentioned in the OPs first post , can you suggest better?

There are lots of usb powered hard drives in tge market that work fine. If 1 usb port can't power it then drives usually come supplied with a y lead so it can draw current from 2 usb slots. Using an m.2 on a USB enclosure is like having a vw golf as your main car and using a m5 as a backup car. It's very expensive and it's full potential is underutilised.

M2 is expensive by gb. And if op wants to have the shock proof functionality. They can just buy 128gb flash drives which are comparatively cheaper