Double USB Cable¶
A clever cooperation of the ‘a fool and his money are parted soon’ department and the ‘crappy high tech’ department, drove me to eBay once more. The story is the following: After my Powerbook broke I ended up with a spare 80GB hard drive, which I am keen on using for backups and other niceties. So I decided to get an external drive enclosure for it, making use of the new iBook’s USB-2 support as those are much cheaper than their FireWire brethren and performance doesn’t matter too much for that purpose.
But little did I know about USB devices. While I had heard that USB can’t power high-powered devices like CD-writers over the bus, I assumed this wasn’t a problem anymore as I could buy a tiny bus-powered case for my hard drive. But it only took a few minutes of using it to learn that I was overly optimistic. Most USB ports I tried it on can’t power the drive. My old TiBook was the only computer doing that without problems. The new iBook can power the drive on its back USB port but not on the front one and both 15″ AlBooks I tried it with couldn’t power the drive up either. My externally powered USB hub is another device that can’t get the drive running. In short – things suck quite badly.
And it’s even worse than that. From time to time, while doing heavy file copying, the drive would stop working on the iBook as well. Which sucks quite badly as it makes it rather difficult to make a complete and reliable backup. At first I assumed that this was an issue with OS X, but asking around suggested that it could very well be a power supply problem where during a phase of high activity the drive needs a little more power than the bus can provide and just kills itself because of that. And afterwards – in the spirit of excellent hardware and software engineering on parts of the chipset maker, the drive maker and Apple – the drive keeps rotating but not writing, and the computer will simply stall all applications that try to access the drive in question – without even bothering to write a message to console.log or system.log about what’s going wrong. Arrrgh, nothing like quality engineering.
Once you’re in this state, the only thing you can do is to physically unplug the drive. That’ll make the computer realise that there is a problem and the affected volumes will be force-unmounted, usually letting the stalled applications go on running. This, of course, isn’t particularly good for the drive, its directory structure and possible the files on it. So that sucks a lot.
As people hinted to me this might be due to a power supply problem, I considered building a cable that takes power from two USB ports and provides it to the drive. Haha, smart idea Mr Sven! But the thought of having to get all the components for that and the prospect of spending a while to find out all the relevant details and having to use a soldering iron just to create some ugly cable put me off. So I was happy to see that I was not the first one with this idea and that you can buy such cables, ready-made, on eBay. Which I did.
And what can I say? It sucks. To begin with I had to discover that my external hub is too ‘clever’ for this cable. It seems that it only activates the power supply when there’s a data connection as well. This means I can’t plug the cable’s second plug into the hub and thus lose my ability to simply hide the whole mess somewhere off my desk. I end up with one of the plugs in the iBook and the other one in the hub – ugly and inefficient.
But the very worst part comes last, the external drive still dies when it’s under heavy usage. Perhaps less frequently than it did before, but it still does. So this whole exercise looks like it’s been a waste of time and money. Yikes! I hate technology. Or the people who make and sell technology. Or whoever is responsible for this mess. Why can’t even such basic things ‘just work’. As in: any drive in any drive case connected to any computer with any cable will work without having to worry or seeing things break every other minute. Isn’t that what ‘standards’ like USB are designed to do?
