Odd occurance for me: I bought a Western Digital 160GB external hard drive (the “Passport”) the other day to move files between my three laptops (2 mac G4 powerbooks and a Toshiba Satelite running Ubuntu 8.0.4), and all my Mac and PC towers (yeah, I’m a serious tech nerd with a problem).

At first I was very happy with this snappy little drive. On my original G4 PowerBook (a 700mghz), the USB 1.1 ports made for slow copies, but the drive operated like a champ. On the towers, everything moved along at a zippy pace. However, once I started to use my newer G4 PowerBook (a 1.5Ghz model, with USB 2), I noticed some problems.

The first time I plugged the Passport drive into my free USB port (the other is used by an external mouse), all was fine. I copied some files upstream and down. After that, I have been unable to mount the drive whatsoever. Just the “click, click” noise forever.

After reading some blog posts, support threads, and printed documentation, I’ve found that the G4 PowerBooks came with less-than-optimally powered USB ports - in some writers opinions, in order to better focus on FireWire. I suppose that would cause the constant clicking of a drive that doesn’t have the required power to fully mount; however, I did get away with using the drive once, for a day. Also, why would my older USB 1.1 enabled PowerBook be able to power the drive, yet my newer USB 2 PowerBook not?

Seems quite sad that I’m going to have to carry around a powered USB hub in order to use a pocket-sized drive. The whole purpose of the small drive was to have an easily portable - and yet large amount of file space - device.

I guess I’ll just have to wait another year until I can get a MacBook or MacBook Pro.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Apple, personal, rant, technology, work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.