So a few weeks ago I buy this very teeny tiny portable hard drive from western digital for my mac book. I was pretty excited about it because it is so small and has so much space for pictures, but especially because there is no power cable….it draws all its power from the USB 2.0 slot.
Oddly, I noticed that occasionally it would turn on and other times it wouldnt….very random. So I call their customer support and they tell me that the drive needs X amount of power and sometimes it cant get all that from one USB port., and they want to send me a Y USB Cord which allows me to plug it into 2 USB ports! YAY! Ridiculous….it totally changes the whole cool concept of the portable hard drive, not to mention my Mac Book Pro only has two USB ports and they are on the opposite side of the computer.
Stay away from this thing!
Can anyone recommend a good portable hard drive that actually works off one USB 2.0 cable?
Ah, the world of external hard drives! Not a Mac person, so I can’t help. I did just get a Maxtor drive that holds, brace yourself, a TERABYTE of data. Holy cow. This does relate to photography because I was shooting at a fairly low resolution (the S, jagged symbol on the D40), just because I’ve been shooting many more exposures lately and it was killing my hard drive. (One event could result in 100 MB or more being used.) Anyway, I’ve been happy with it, so it might be a brand to investigate. Oh, and Michael, I wanted to thank you for the regularity of your posts! Checking your blog has now become a part of my daily routine, and even when the posts don’t pertain to photography, the every day posting is very much appreciated.
Michael, My wife is a reader of yours and I am a Mac user. I would recommend the WD Passport Studio. It is the same form factor BUT it also has a Firewire powered port on it. It is specially targeted at Mac users as well. It is a little more expensive due to the extra port, I guess. If you do not want to go with WD, I would look for a FireWire powered hard drive. I believe that they output more volts than a USB 2..0 port does. I hope that this helps you out.
Hey Michael, try acomdata, they are awesome they work perfect with my mac. the only bad thing is that the biggest capacity for the portable vertion is only 120GB. You can also try Toshiba they are good, they have them at best buy but they are cheaper online.
How disappointing! I love my external hard drive…it’s a 750G MyBook (made by WD, I think). It’s small enough to take somewhere, if I absolutely needed to, but not nearly as small as your 320.
thank you everyone for your input. I think I am going to try Michael’s suggestion because I have a firewire port that I dont use for hardly anything and I hear its faster too?
ps- Thank you scott! I appreciate you appreciating the work I put on the blog. I dont think I have missed a day ever since I started coming up on two years now. 🙂
Firewire will blow your socks off. I don’t care what people say, Firewire was designed to transport large files fast. The tech specs put USB2.0 and Firewire 400 as the same speed. Firewire all the way. If you can get Firewire 800 it is twice as fast, but a bit more. I have 7 external HDs and 4 of those are Firewire 400, 1 firewire 800 and two are USB 2.0
Hello all, we’ve gone through ExHD’s so much and found that theres only one really reliable, fast HD – LaCie All Terrain. Try it Mike, we’ve taken this all over the world with our gear and have not one faill. We’ve tried them all. So far we’ve stuck with LaCie. I have suggested this two few Pros in the biz and have tohanked me countless times. Good Luck!