Looking for low-power 2.5" HD, 320+ GB

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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obarthelemy
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2009 9:07 pm
Location: Paris, france

Looking for low-power 2.5" HD, 320+ GB

Post by obarthelemy » Sun Feb 28, 2010 6:29 am

There's a lot happening on the ARM front, with the "Plug" products soon to come with a bit richer IO, including HDMI. Looking at the user experiences, one frequent issue when connecting an external USB drive to these plugs is a dead PSU: HDD spin-up power requirements are well above the max allowed by the USB standard. Once the drive has spun up, every thing is peachy.

Solutions are:
- use an external PSU for the HD, or a powered USB hub. Kinda sucks, since one of the main advantages of Plugs is their small size.
- use 2 USB ports for the HD. Would work, except there's not that many ports to start with, and I'm wondering if even then, power draw would not be a bit iffy.
- find a well-behaved 2.5" drive that doesn't suck that much power during spin-up, or has a utility to enable that. I've been looking around, but couldn't find anything for certain. Would you guys have some pointers ?

Thanks for any help, and best regards.

Olivier

CTT
Posts: 35
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2009 12:14 pm
Location: Romania

Post by CTT » Sun Feb 28, 2010 1:26 pm

If you want to avoid using multiple ports or external power supplies, I would start looking for a drive that has a cable with a single USB connector; it will probably still push a bit the USB specs (at startup) but you'll have a better chance it won't be by much.

I would suggest getting an external drive instead of a hard drive and enclosure, so you can have a certain confidence that the whole thing will comply (again, more or less) with the USB standard.

In case you want to use a separate enclosure, for the hard drive I would look towards the WD Scorpio Blue - it has a Reduced Power Spinup jumper, so that might help.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... faqid=2670

obarthelemy
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Dec 14, 2009 9:07 pm
Location: Paris, france

Thanks !

Post by obarthelemy » Sun Feb 28, 2010 3:20 pm

I didn't know about the Blue's Reduced Power Spinup, nor is it mentionned in tests.

That helps a lot.

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