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USB power from Sager Laptops

post #1 of 5
3/14/03 at 12:12am
Thread Starter 
I plan on using a 2.5” external hard drive with either Sager laptop I end up buying by connecting it to the USB port. My concern is related to whether there would be enough power to draw from the USB ports. I understand that some laptop manufacturers decrease the power supplied to the USB ports to increase battery life. I believe IBM does this with the Thinkpad. A common solution to this problem is to use the PS/2 port as a source of external power when connecting the hard drive. However, using the PS/2 port for power takes away the user’s ability to hot connect/disconnect the hard drive, thus forcing the user to shutdown before doing either.
An alternative solution is to use two USB ports: one to connect the external hard drive to the machine, and the other to draw the power. On some machines, such a scheme still does not supply enough power since the ports are underpowered. So, my questions are as follows:

1. Power supplied though USB ports, I believe, is 500mA. What is the power supplied by the USB ports on the 56xx and the 888x?

2. Do any of the current owners of either the 56xx or the 888x use an external 2.5” hard drive? If so, what are your power arrangements?

3. Would a hard drive consume more power if it were utilizing the speeds of the USB 2.0 port?

4. Is the Firewire port on the 888x powered?

I truly appreciate your answers. And thanks for the great forum.

Guy
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post #2 of 5
4/16/03 at 5:39pm


I, too, would really like to have an answer to this question.
I read in some other threads that the ports are not powered.

MY WISH:

DREAM:
If Sager can customize for me with the powered ports!
(How fast will the battery drain then?)

CLOSER:
The port is conditionally powered if the machine is
running on DC-in.


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post #3 of 5
4/16/03 at 5:59pm
I own two external 2.5" enclosures (the kind shown here. One is FW only, the other is combo FW/USB2.0.

The FireWire port on the Sagers is NOT powered. The 56xx has the 4-pin mini-port and the 888x has the full-size 6-pin standard port (but it is NOT powered). The USB/FW drive enclosures came with PS/2 powertaps, so you can get power from the PS/2 port of the laptop. Click the link in my sig and scroll down the photos there, you'll see it in action w/ my 8887.

As for the USB providing enough power, I will double-check it tonight (I don't use the USB portion of my combo drive, as firewire is superior). However, I think it DID power it w/o external supply when I was testing it out when I first got it... again, I'll check tonight when I get home from work and post my results (if no one has answered more definitively by then).

As far as power-to-speed, the USB port is NOT faster than the FireWire port in my experience. Some have reported that when there is a single HUGE file, USB2.0 does a little better than FireWire, but I have not noticed it. In my experiences FW soundly trumps USB2.0 in every aspect. Take it with a grain of salt, though, it could just be all of my setups...

-myrkat
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post #4 of 5
4/16/03 at 7:53pm
Yeah, check this out, FW does offer a little bit more performance than the USB 2.0. http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage...chmark_results USB 2.0 is about 5-10MB/s slower
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post #5 of 5
4/16/03 at 8:49pm

Please see the link below:

http://www.bytezone.com.au/index_ret...product_id=222

Does it mean that the adapter shown in the link above
would work only if the USB is powered? And given the
fact that many of the laptops don't have the powered
USB/FireWire ports, this adapter is totally less
useful (being polite)?

I am in the process of buying a laptop, I am almost
sold to 8887v except for some things like these that
I want to get clarified/awared of.

This forum is of enormous help to all of us.
A sincere Thanx to all you guys! Keep up the
good work.

-----------------------------------------------
Knowledge is Power. Power Corrupts.
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