Hooking up old portable hard drive to Visionsat

[Mr Tony]

This may sound stupid but I'm not the most computer savvy

I have an old Seatgate 40GB portable drive. It has 2 USB connections. One says "power & data" and one says "power only". The problem is when I hook it up to the Sonicview or Visionsat they dont send enough juice to power it. Yes I'm using the "power & data" plug. The azbox I can hook it up to both USB ports.

So here is a stupid question. Those USB hub's that you can hook 4 USB things to it. If I buy one of them and plug both USB ports from the HDD into that hub it should work right? Does the hub has live power to all ports?
(on a side note...the power cord is hard wired to the portable drive)

 

[Larry1]

As long as the USB hub is a powered USB hub..... i.e. one with an adapter that plugs into an outlet, then it should supply enough extra power. You would only need to plug the power only connection into the powered USB hub, and the power and data into the Visionsat. The power only connector on the hard drive only has power connections in the cable. No data or any other signalling. It is needed because one USB port can not provide enough power for the hard disk. The USB port only provides a limited amount of power. The Visionsat may have problems if both the data only and the data and power connector is plugged into the hub, as the data will have to communicate through the hub. Different chips in the hubs can cause different results.

 

[Mr Tony]

So I can't plug both USB ports into the hub and then the hub into the Visionsat? I seen a bunch of non powered ones for cheap thats why I wondered

**Sigh** maybe I should just drop $50 on a new portable drive. I saw Rat Shack had some cheap (even a 1TB external for $70)

 

[Anole]

same as what Larry said

1. you'd need a powered hub.
They typically have a 2 amp switching power supply to run four ports.

2. either I read about or tried a hub on my Visionsat (long time ago), and it didn't work.
(I had self-powered 3.5" drives that worked fine on their AC supply, and 2.5" portable drives that ran on power off the data cable from the receiver)

3. So, you'd plug the power cable into the hub, and the data cable into the Visionsat.
(Some drives have an additional tiny barrel connector for 5v remote power.)

 

[brex2001]

A Macally model DotHub has 5 USB ports, powered by a small wall wart & is compatible with Winblows, Mac OSX & Linux. And they have a small footprint: 2x2 inch.

Newegg list them for $17.99 right now, plus $5.99 S&H.

Item#: N82E16817111051

 

[Mr Tony]

well I go to Rat Shack and they have a 320GB drive for $50 but it has 2 cables on it too. 2nd one is for "extra power" which means of course I'll need that
maybe I should have kept that drive I got from wally world yesterday

I did notice now the 40GB drive the cable can be removed but the mini USB conection is so deep the usb-min usb cable I have here wont work. Oh well learning lots of new stuff

 

[Tron]

Iceberg, I have used Western Digital Passport portables on the Visionsat without the need for any extra power. They work as long as you use the very short (~1 foot) cable that comes with the drives. These drives are often available cheaply, in fact the WD factory store had 500Gb Passport drives for $45 recently...

I'm currently using powered 3.5" (non-portable) external WD Elements 500Gb drives with both Visionsats and the Openbox. It should also be noted that most new hard drives come formatted in NTFS, which the Visionsats will not read. Therefore, the drives require reformatting as FAT32 using a program such as CompuApps Swissknife.

 

[Mr Tony]

so I found a cheap 60GB portable drive on EBay for cheap (like 12 bucks shipped). Got it to day and it has 2 USB ports (uh oh) but plugged in the main one and the Visionsat worked great with it. Formatted it and records fine.