[mdlug] External Floppy Drive

[Aaron Kulkis]

Peter Bart wrote:
> 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?

Yes...but the USB hub chip is DESIGNED to handle all of
that charging/discharging of the internal MOSFET transistors
(in digital electronics, a MOSFET is essentially a capacitor
which can be charged or discharged via a controllable
internal short-circuit) What causes the heat, despite drawing
practically no current while maintaining one state of the
other is the or 0.x+ GHz clock speeds


> 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.

Have you tried VMWare, VirtualBox, Xen, Bochs, or anything
else like that?

> 
> Best Regards,
>