Comments | avias: LIES, DAMNED LIES

avias

LIES, DAMNED LIES

Feb 15, 2008 07:47

So, I'm running out of space on my hard drives again. Between a solid 100GB of comics, nearly as many TV shows, and I don't even want to know how much porn, things are getting a bit cramped in here. While the laptop's been exceedingly helpful in terms of reading/watching a lot of the massive backlog I've built up, it and its piddly 160GB hard ( Read more... )

Comments 3

ytse February 15 2008, 15:16:18 UTC

None of your ports run over 500mA because the USB specification is 500mA. The WD drive is breaking the rules, which is kind of surprising for that big of a manufacturer. Do any of these logos appear on the packaging? http://www.usb.org/developers/compliance/logo/

avias February 15 2008, 16:03:08 UTC

Huh. Now that you mention it, they don't. The box for my older LaCie has it, but the only thing on the WD package is the 'trident' logo next to the 'Plug and play USB 2.0' claim on the front of the bubble, and now that I look closer it lacks any trademark symbols. The packaging's kinda pathetic regardless, being one of the worst examples of providing as little information as possible in as many languages as possible I've seen in a long time.

I had noticed that 500mA was the power limit listed on the Wiki page for USB when I was digging around trying to figure out what was going on, but, well, it's Wikipedia. I never know what to trust with them, especially with something that I only know vague details about.

This whole thing's definitely giving me a much worse impression of WD. I've got a couple of their standard internal HDDs that've been working fine, so I figured I could trust them not to screw this up too badly. Guess they showed me!

bcarothers February 15 2008, 19:22:49 UTC

Hrm. For what it's worth, I scooped WD's 500 GB MyBook (Essential Edition) off of New Egg a few weeks back, and so far so good. Just plugged it in and it fired up just fine running off of my 2-year-old Dell XPS laptop (USBs also at 500mA). It came formatted as FAT32, so the only thing I really had to do before using it was to reformat as NTFS. It comes with some Google software that reviewers recommended ditching, but you might find some use for it. For less than $150, I'm pleased thus far. My only quibble is that it doesn't like to power down when I select it to "Safely Remove" (there's no power button) but it will do so when I log out & then log in as a different user. Usually I just wait until I turn the computer off to unplug everything.