Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 08 July 2008 18:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
That’s because computers seem to power their USB ports differently. My Seagate 160GB drive, for example, comes with a two-headed USB cable, one for data and the other for power.
I plugged it into the two USB 2.0 ports on the front of a friend’s computer the other day, and got that “clicking sound” which indicated not enough power was being delivered. So we plugged the two cables into the USB ports at the back, and presto, no problem.
So I’m taking PC Magazine’s word on this, as well as Toshiba’s who specifically say that the drives are “powered through the USB port rather than a power cable”, but personal experience will be the true indicator.
If Toshiba really can ensure that however much power is being delivered by the USB port is enough to power its hard drive, then shame on other hard disk companies for making us fiddle with silly two-headed USB port stealing connectors!
As an aside, PC Magazine says the case is plain and looks like an external drive anyone could have made, but the images at the PC Magazine site shows the drive with nice swooshy lines and a Toshiba logo, not that the case design is going to have any impact whatsoever on the performance of the drive in question.
In addition, the drive is formatted as FAT32, which means it’ll work with either PCs or Macs without needing any special reformatting. However if you do reformat this drive as an NTFS volume, you’ll find that you can read it on Macs, but you won’t be able to write to it.
That said, Mac users are probably well aware of this, but hey, if not, you certainly know now.
Now, a bit more about the backup software. This software is designed to backup files, not create an image of your entire hard drive, and you can customise what type of files you’d like automatically backed up in the background.
The data is “stored in the original file format”, so no special software is required to open the files on another computer or your own computer. That means no compression to save space, but then no hassles later on, either.
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