[plug] 2.5 USB Enclosure

Chris Caston caston at arach.net.au
Sun Aug 7 04:46:43 WST 2005


On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 14:08, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 11:50 +0800, Chris Caston wrote:
> > On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 11:47, Daniel Pearson wrote:
> > > Time to get a new power supply :P
> > > 
> > 
> > They ended up with a TR2-430W (and they complained heavily about the
> > price despite the fact I only made about $8 markup) but I didn't bring
> > out a usb pci card so I got an angry phone call they tried to use the
> > hub again and XP said something along the lines "There is not enough
> > power to run this device"
> 
> There are both powered and unpowered hubs. An unpowered hub can only
> power simple devices with very low power draw, such as mice and
> keyboards. I'd expect a USB key to fall into that category too, but that
> depends on (a) the USB key not lying to the hub about its power
> requirements and (b) the USB key's designers not totally screwing it up.
> 
> I have had problems with every USB hub I've had the misfortune to use.
> Not just power issues either, but general reliability problems and
> bizarre quirks like devices just powering off until the hub is reset.
> 
> If I need more ports, I just install a USB card these days - they're
> cheap and easy, and more importantly they actually work.

I'm completely agree with you on that one
> 
> As for "sucking all the power out," I find it difficult to believe that
> a USB key could use any significant amount of power compared to, say, a
> CPU or HDD. If the machine has the power to spin up its hard disk on
> boot, it has the power to run a USB key. Are you sure there wasn't an
> electrical fault involved?

It was a USB hub and he had a printer plugged into it.

>  It's also not impossible that the /OS/ is
> crashing in such a way as to instantly power off the machine (not
> directly related, but reiserfs, I'm looking at you) when the device is
> plugged in.
> 

His original PSU blew, he bought a cheap 350w  and that blew, I came out
and put in a much better quality 350w it worked fine for a while but
later the machine would just throw up a black screen when trying to boot
XP. It booted fine after unplugging the usb hub. 

I put in the 430w PSU and it booted fine even with the hub but then
started causing problems later down the track. 

It may have been a mains power issue I guess but I'm blaming the hub.
> --
> Craig Ringer
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG discussion list: plug at plug.org.au
> http://www.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/plug
> Committee e-mail: committee at plug.linux.org.au
> 




More information about the plug mailing list