Not all external USB hard drives are equal

I’ve had a Simpletech USB external hard drive for 2 years. It’s a smaller capacity drive, only 40GB. But it’s form factor is great. Cool looking and small. It is supposed to be bus powered, which it is, but the USB cable that comes with it has 2 USB plugs on it. Apparently the power requirements of the drive can not be met by all hardware. Count the Numark DDS80 as one of those pieces of equipment that cannot provide enough power to the Simpletech 40GB drive with only one USB plug. You’ll need to use up 2 of your USB ports on the DDS in order to power-up and operate the Simpletech hard drive. This may or may not be an issue for you, but if you intend to use a couple hard drives, either for redundancy or just because you have a large amount of music, you may find this limitation of the Simpletech frustrating. There is a DC power input on the drive, but I do not wish to have one more power adapter in my rack to provide power for this little drive. I have not yet tried a powered hub to see if that would provide enough power so that just one of the plugs would be needed. But as the price keeps dropping for these USB external drives, I may never get to that point. I paid $90 for the 40GB drive two years ago and just paid $79 for the 320GB Western Digital.

I also own a 320GB Western Digital USB powered external hard drive, the My Passport Essential.

Although it has 8x the capacity of the Simpletech, it only requires a single USB plug to power-up and operate. It seems to work just fine so far but to be honest, I have not had the DDS80 long enough yet to have had the time to put the WD hard drive through rigorous testing or usage. Just spending the little time with it so far that I have, has been trouble-free