Where are the internal power supplies?
Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 08:12pm
A few weeks ago Thomas Hawk posted about using external hard drives to back up photos. The post and the comments that followed provide a lot of good ideas and advice, but none of them address a fundamental issue I have with external USB drives:
- They use an external power supply.
I have problems with this:
- The power supply is an additional part that must be carried with the drive. This reduces the convenience of the drive unless there is a power supply at each location the drive is to be used.
- The pins on the power connector are too fragile. Between myself and people I know there are at least a half dozen times where a drive has become useless because the connector or the socket became faulty.
- The power supply adds to the clutter if the drive needs to be connected for an extended period of time.
A few years ago, before USB, the option for external drives was SCSI and those cases came with internal power supplies. Simply connect an IEC power lead and the SCSI cable and the drive was ready to go.
Why can’t that be the case for USB cases? You could transport a single item which could be used anywhere that had a standard power cable and a standard USB cable.
I can think of two possible solutions which both involve sacrificing a USB drive case:
- Fit the hard drive, USB interface and the (previously) external power adapter inside another case.
- Fit the USB interface inside a SCSI hard drive case in place of the SCSI connector.
For now I’m just going to keep my eye out for cheap SCSI cases on eBay.
