~misfit~ wrote:
On 6/07/2019 10:34 AM, VanguardLH wrote:

The OP said he *thinks* an A/C powered USB enclosure *might* be more
reliable than using a USB port. His experience has been the A/C powered
USB drives were more reliable than the port-powered USB drives. My
experience has been the port-powered USB drives work just fine for a
long time -- PROVIDED you use a port that supplies enough power (USB3)
or you know the HDD inside the enclosure can work on just one USB2 port
instead of requiring 2 USB2 ports via Y-adapter. I've had USB2 HDDs,
too, and those required the Y-adapter, and as long as I used it to get
power from 2 USB2 ports then the USB HDD worked just fine. With just
one USB2 port, those old USB2 HDDs might not spin up.

A problem with those USB2 'Y' adapter things is sometimes you need to be
sure to plug in the USB A plug with the data pins *after* the auxiliary
power supply USB A plug. (Or plug them both in at the same time.)

I had a drive corrupt itself because of plugging them in in the wrong
order once (a few years ago now though).

The situation is entirely unsatisfactory.

Period and end of story.

Do customers need an engineering degree to use a product ?

*******

I have no "Slim this" or "Passport that" here.

Can you guess why ???

Who wants to play whack-a-mole with storage devices.

Especially the 2.5" ones with the *captive* USB
ports, so you don't even have a SATA port to use.
You can't even shuck those and work on them via
a properly powered SATA port.

Paul