[mdlug] External Floppy Drive

[Aaron Kulkis]

Peter Bart wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 	I'm in need of an external floppy drive; and taking Rays advice on not
> letting the drive suck power from USB; I went looking. Just quickly
> looking in a few places, all seem to be powered via USB. Is this because
> the power requirements are not as large a hard drive and could safely be
> powered by the USB port, or should I seriously go looking? I would be
> using this at home, so power availability is not an issue.

1: floppy drives run intermittently -- power is drawn for
   only short intervals, except if you're formatting a disk

2: the power disappated by the USB hub chip itself isn't
   that much -- it's DC current, and a low voltage-drop
   across the USB chip... the real power sucking in most
   modern chips are the internal signals, because they
   are constantly switching on/off/on/off, and the faster
   they switch (higher clock rate, or just more frequent
   0 <--> 1 state changes for any other reason) the higher
   the power consumption -- the power leads don't have
   this problem

3: If you're really worried about power draw for the
   external floppy drive, then just get an external
   USB hub that has an external power supply.