Quote:
Quote:
I plug in both to be safe.

Of course, unless the device enumerates separately on both ports and is awarded 500mW by the PC on each, you aren't technically any safer. A pint says no enclosure in the world bothers doing this (do you see two USB devices in Windows?).



I use these double-plug devices, and can confirm that they do indeed get full power from both plugs. So they work.

I have a ThinkPad A21p notebook that will NOT work with external USB drives unless they're self-powered -- the machine has only one USB port (1.1), so there's nowhere for the second plug to go to help matters.

But all of our other multi-port USB machines work fine with the double plug cables. One of the two plugs is for power-only, and has no signal wires; the other has both power+signal. Plugging *either* one into any machine here causes the attached drive to spin up.

So I usually remember to plug both into the PC first, and then plug the "B" end (actually an A plug) into the USB enclosure. Wouldn't want to fry something inside my notebook! Some Apple notebooks had that problem once (burned out USB traces on mainboard due to drive startup current). I think Drakino suffered from that once.

Cheers


Edited by mlord (21/03/2006 20:05)