Powering an external USB hard drive
Arguments about powering an external USB drive directly from USB.
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Been doing this for two months with no problems yet.
Update…
My plug died in Jan 2010 after nearly six months uptime. The power supply failed. This seems to be a common complaint of people who power an external usb drive from the hub, have a look at plugcomputer.org/plugforum.
It’s a twenty minute job to replace the power supply though and now my plug is back up and working.
My plug has also died, and it is almost certainly the power unit too. I used this exact HD for a two months. The more I look into this, the more I find this has happened to people. There are two reasons being banged around, cheap capacitors and hard disc spin up drawing beyond the stated draw. I think the nub is, it is not safe to power any HD via USB with your SheevaPlug.
Hmm….well, hard drive used the most power during cold startups. So I suppose it could burn out the power supply if done repeatedly.
I suppose running this site, which caused me to keep the plug on 24/7, saved it from burning out the power supply. I agree that if you have any doubt, run the external HDD off a brick.
I just got a CD drive, that I’d like to leave plugged into the plug, so it will be available to any computer in the house (via the wireless). But I can’t get it to automount. I’ve tried USBMount, but while it gives the /media/usb* directories, there’s nothing in them. Any ideas? On my linux laptops, I just put in a disc, and it automounts. Can we get this via the plug?
I get the following in dmesg:
scsi 0:0:0:0: CD-ROM TSSTcorp CD/DVDW SH-S182M SB02 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
scsi 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 5
and there is a /dev/sg0, but I can’t seem to mount it (iso9660 and udf don’t seem to exist, and it claims it is not a block file). Does this sound familiar?