Does the MacBook Pro have full power USB ports for portable drives?

[techmonkey]

Ive read that some laptops have low powered USB ports which are not suitable for external portable drives like the Western Digital Passport drives. Does anyone know if the MacBook Pro ports are full powered USB ports?

 

[mcavjame]

I run 1 WD 250 GB drive on my Macbook. Ican't imagine the pro would not do what the little brother can.

PS - If you live near Costco, they have the best price on the 250 GB passport.

 

[techmonkey]

I run 1 WD 250 GB drive on my Macbook. Ican't imagine the pro would not do what the little brother can.

PS - If you live near Costco, they have the best price on the 250 GB passport.

Cool, thanks 🙂

So are the portable drives much slower than a standard 3.5" external drive? Im thinking about using the drive as a backup for my 120GB internal drive, plus some data storage.

 

[mcavjame]

Cool, thanks 🙂

So are the portable drives much slower than a standard 3.5" external drive? Im thinking about using the drive as a backup for my 120GB internal drive, plus some data storage.

My external drives are all FW, so it's not really a fair comparison. It is slower, but not unbearable. I used to have a 2.5" FW portable, but it was only 40 GB. You can still get FW portables but they are hard to come by now and the price tends to be higher.

Doing a quick search, the only new one I could find was from Lacie (a long time apple supporter) Here's a link: http://www.lacie.com/ca/products/product.htm?pid=10976
This 120 GB retails for $140 although you may be able to find a street price lower. That is the same price as Costco charges for the 250 GB WD passport, so it becomes a price/performance thing.

 

[GRN99EX]

My external drives are all FW, so it's not really a fair comparison. It is slower, but not unbearable. I used to have a 2.5" FW portable, but it was only 40 GB. You can still get FW portables but they are hard to come by now and the price tends to be higher.

Doing a quick search, the only new one I could find was from Lacie (a long time apple supporter) Here's a link: http://www.lacie.com/ca/products/product.htm?pid=10976
This 120 GB retails for $140 although you may be able to find a street price lower. That is the same price as Costco charges for the 250 GB WD passport, so it becomes a price/performance thing.

The Apple Store sells Firelite drives that are firewire, and can be daisy chained together. As for external drives, which ones you can run will all depend on your front side bus. My 2.16GHz core duo could not run my maxtor drive without using both USB ports (one for data AND power, and the other for power). But, my new 2.5 GHz MBP runs it on a single USB cable with no problem. If you don't have the 800MHz bus, just keep that in mind. It gets irritating when your external drive eats up both of your USB ports.

 

[Eric L]

I run a WD portable off the USB on my 17" MBP with no problems.

 

[PDE]

I run a WD passport elements 320gb USB2 on my Penryn MBP with no problems. When I connected it to my mother's powerbook G4 1.5ghz, it didn't work though.

 

[iCeFuSiOn]

I can use my 160 GB WD Passport with my Santa Rosa (Late 2007) MacBook Pro 15" without any trouble, works great.

 

[alphaod]

Yes the MBP USB port supports the entire spec for bus powered deviced. It just doesn't work with the MBA drive which is out of spec.