Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks
Technically speaking: ALL USB ports ARE powered.  (Pins 1 and 4)
Depending on the USB version #, the power available differed.
USB 1.0 was for low powered devices (mice,keyboard,joy stick)
USB 2.x is supposed to be 500 mA.
Crummy designs or poor craftsmanship probably accounts for why Front Ports fail to meet 'spec'. (When the founder was there, Dells were solid. Then... they got cheap  , not even a spare Molex plug at the drive bay. ) |
i suspect dell did something sneaky to save a few cents - like putting 500ma total onto the hub, and leave the ports to squabble over who gets what. this was on the inspiron 3847 which i reckon was designed with all the cost savings they could get away with. even the reaktek audio chip sounded crap, compared with what was in older dells.
back on topic, some portable drives by design need all of that 500 ma to work, so if a specific PC only manages 499 and a specific drive tries to pull 501 then splat...
problem goes away with usb 3 ports , as they can deliver 2 amps, but then you can get other lack of backwards compatibility issues. Some ancient USB 2 stuff , that was built before USB3 arrived, does not seem to play nice in USB3 ports even though it " should"