5.25" internal vs portable DVD writer power usage.

[mxnerd]

Why such a big difference? Just curious.

I heard that internal drive use up to 30w, yet external portable drive use only 5v x 0.5A (USB 2.0 spec.) = 2.5w I guess.

So why such big difference? What prevent vendor making internal drive that use a lot less power, like close to 10w?

Guess will only purchase portable drive in the future.

 

[C1]

Kind of an involved question. First, if the physical HDD is the same in each case (ie, internal or external) then the power draw characteristics FOR THE PHYSICAL DRIVE should effectively be the same. The physical HDDs have design specifications regarding this.

Now it is possible to employ power down (green drive technology) in each case (ie, external or internal) which will reduce overall power consumption.

I would expect that possibly an external enclosure to use a bit more power as the enclosure would have its own power supply (assume 3.5" HDD). The issue here would be performance, so USB 3 or SATA should be employed for the external.

It is possible to employ, in each case a 2.5" HDD (which Im told a lot of people are actually doing in servers) and that will keep power consumption down, probably at a slight tradeoff in performance. In such a case, I would expect the external HDD to still use a tiny bit more power because of the enclosure electronics, but it should be a small difference. The more important consideration would be performance, hence, to ensure use of USB 3 or SATA with the external.

 

[Itchrelief]

Externals seem to be a lot slower. My guess would be lower power to rotate the disc, plus lower power to the laser to as they have a much longer time to burn the same pit.

edit: it also seems like externals use a y-usb cable, so they're actually getting 5w if they're playing by the rules

 

[heymrdj]

I can vouch that external runs slower to reduce power. I have 3 DVD burners in my system to rip discs (goes to a RAID 10 array). Sometimes I add a fourth USB drive just to juggle more discs. But the external DVD burner (external HP model for HP netbooks) is slow as molasses, barely ripping more than 4x while the internal drives sit at 15x+ the whole time. The internal drives easily go through 3 discs before the external goes through 1. You can tell that the power just isn't there. I got an external dvd burner that had the option of being self powered or using a wall adapter. Self powered burn speeds were 1-2.4x. Using the wall adapter it ramped up to 8x. It's definitely a power issue.

 

[mxnerd]

My ASUS slim portable DVD burner comes with a Y USB cable, but I only needs 1 USB connection to use it, including burning. So it only uses 2.5w while burning CD/DVD. Not fastest fashion though, I admit. Looks like internal DVD burner is the 3rd largest component behind CPU/video card that consumes power.