[mdlug] External Floppy Drive

[Peter Bart]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:39:21 -0500
Aaron Kulkis <akulkis00 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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

That's kind of what I was thinking/hoping for but I wanted to confirm that.

> 
> 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

I think I understand this. For ex every read or write in my case would be a state change? In any case I get the point that it's not enough to worry about, thanks for explaining though.

> 
> 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.

Yes, that is another option I wanted to make sure about. I assumed as much; what else would the power be for; but with my record....... And for those of you wondering just what the #%¡¿§*°½ßñ I'm up to, I'm attempting to load Windows XP onto a sata hard drive. The only point to that being by beloved's SIMS  games will run. Apparently XP cannot detect sata drives w/o having first loaded the drivers. Off a  floppy drive no less. Since the Thinkpad drives I still have won't work I thought I may as well add to my travelling roadshow.

Best Regards,

-- 
Peter The Plumber sm

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