Anyone try a USB powered hard drive yet

Not looking at externally powered units, but something similar to this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822157009

no one has a usb powered drive to test this with?

According to Pioneer the only hdd's that can be powered are single layer drives such as used in the ipod 16gb and smaller. The usb cable only provides 500mA of power to run the drive. Most usb hdd's require more than this amount. You should check the manufacturers info before buying the drive. I am currently mulling over adding a power inverter to run an external hdd from and connecting to my 700bt. Let us know what you have found out.

I have checked out several portable hard drives and the specs for them, and for some reason none of the manufacturers or sellers have what kind of power is needed via USB to run them.

Edit: The Western Digital Passports require about 650mA of power. It also looks like most of these come with a USB 2.0 Y-cable in order to get enough power to operate. Looks like we're SOL.

Since most of these have Y cables, do you guys think something like the following would allow our units to power a HD, given the extra amp or so of power it would spit out?

That may be for the 3.5" factor drives. Im talking about powering an notebook drive via USB. I have done that before with no extrap ower cord or cable other than the USB cable.. It will depend on the power to the drive as stated before. Im gonig to try the one i posted above and see what happens

thank god for neweggs 30 day return policy on the drive

if it works great if not im out 8 bucks on the attempt

That drive you stated said it needs a 5v power supply, and all the manual for my f700bt says is it has a 500mA current supply so I am unsure. I even pulled up the data sheet off of Transcends website and it doesn't give specifics. Good luck with it and let us know how it goes.

will do should have it in 2 days time give or take. newegg is quick.

SUCCESS

the Trancend drive works on my AVIC F90BT. I ended up buying, just in case, a usb car charger similar to the one picutred above for $20. a Scosche universal USB reVIVE car charger, model USB12v2 for the second USB plug the wire had and it not only reads the drive, but plays the music and the DIVX files from the hard drive. Seek time was instant as i only had about 20 songs and 2 movies on the drive. I am in the process of adding 50gb of music and some movies to see how it does now

oh yea. Since i routed the double ended usb wire in my car, stupid me cant transfer any files to the hard drive unless i get another cable or pull the car apart again...........................................OR NOT. My mini USB cable for my phone, a single USB cord and connector is powering the drive on my pc right now. I wonder if the drive would work without the extra power cord it came with in the car. I will try that tommorow

Not sure what format you have the external drive. I was successfull hooking up an external drive with a similiar install. Having the a converter running to supply the HDD with power via the Y connector. But when I filled it up past 32 gigs, it would only read the first song in the folder. It also took forever to load up. I was using a notebook HDD, with a cheapo external case. I ended up opting for a 32gig USB flash drive instead.

fat32. the key is leaving the root folder empty with only 1 folder leading to the files

Great success. How is it functioning now with more data on it and does it work w/o the extra usb power?

If you could post pics and a list of the products that you have used and the configuration would be great, I am sure a lot of us want to add the hdd flexibility to our systems.

thanks

anyone tried using a USB extension cable? (Male to female and like 10 feet long) I'm thinking of running an extension cable from the dash to my console, so I can hook up my ipod if I want, or an ext hard driver if its under 500mA or whatever else.