Looking for suggestions on an external HD for my Mac Powerbook G4. ; The Western Digital Passport USB drive did not work on my powerbook. ; Apparently some of the models of the Powerbook do not supply enough power on the USB ports to drive the USB drives. ; Worked on my iMac and on my work Dell laptop. I suppose a Firewire drive would work, but they seem more expensive. ; My other option is to upgrade the internal drive which is now 80 GB.
I have an Iomega FW drive for Time Machine, and a Western Digital MyBook as my primary external, and another external I built myself using a Seagate drive since they have a 5 yr warranty on the HD itself.
That LaCie Rugged looks nice and small, hopefully the Firewire port will do the trick. ; Forgot to mention this will be for traveling, so size matters!
Question. ; Did that passport drive have an optional external power connection? I wondered and looked up WD's site.. there, for the current passport models, it says "An optional cable is available for the few computers that limit power from the USB port". ; So you might be able to get an external power dongle to make the same drive work with your USB power challenged powerbook. I use WD external drives, I've got two Mybooks currently. ; One is a terrabyte drive that I took to WDW this year. ; It's not small, and since it requires external power it's bulkier still when you take the adapter into account. ; But it offered a significantly better cost per megabyte compared to the passports. Dang.. at the time I thought 1tb models were the largest single drive models they had. ; Now they've got 2tb single drives, and their dual drive models go, as you'd expect, up to 4. ; Yowza. ; Moore's law in action, it wasn't that long ago that the first 1tb dual drive model showed up.
