Power for external hard drive?

Question

I have an external hard drive using power from the wall adpter. In some cases i don't have the wall power. Is there any other way I can modify my external hard drive to use with my usb laptop's power? I am really appreciated for your answer.
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Answer 1

I'm not really an expert on this, but as far as I know, external USB hard drives use up a lot of power as it is, and for that reason I don't think it would be possible (or very easy) to modify your hard drive so that it worked without external power on a DESKTOP PC, let alone a laptop.

If you need the portability, there are a few portable hard drives with sufficient hard drive space that run off USB power only (however some computers limit the amount of power the USB can output, and I don't own a laptop so I can't really help). One of these is the "Western Digital 80gb Passport".

Take a look at it here:
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX15196(ME).aspx

You should note however that this hard drive, or any solid state hard drive without an external power source, will drain the battery quite a bit (I would think, because the laptop would need to power 2 hard drives, sometimes at the same time).

Good luck, and I hope this helped.
Happy holidays to you too.

Answer 2

Not really, no. The problem is that the external hard drive is only made to accept power from one source. You can plug it in to the laptop, but unless the unit is built to take power from the USB cable, this won't really help.

There are external hard drives out there that come with a split USB cable. These require two USB ports out of your computer - one is for data, and the other is for power.

Answer 3

The USB port probably doesn't provide enough wattage to the external HDD to run it. What you can do is buy an active UPS. As long as the UPS gets power, it stays fully charged providing power to anything plugged into it. If you lose power, the UPS acts as a battery for all of the devices. So as long as you have the UPS plugged into an outlet that's always receiving power and the external HDD plugged into the UPS, you should be fine.