Portable hard drive: which USB port?

I'm going to buy a WD My Passport Essential SE. The m14x has a special powered USB port on the left side and two USB 3.0 ports on the right. Will the USB 3.0 ports be enough to power the drive, or will I have to sacrifice speed and use the USB 2.0 port?

 

If your HDD is a USB 2, and if u want to use it on USB 3, the speed will cap at around 20MB/s - 25MB/s as for my 1TB HDD, its transfer speed is around that everytime I use USB 2 on the USB 3, but if I use USB 2 on USB 2, it will be sometime just between 15MB/s and less.

But for your HDD which is a portable one, it most of the time will be power from the laptop, so and for most USB port, it will also work similar to those on M14x's Power Share USB port, the feature for that is while even your laptop is off, it still be able to continue charging.

So I think u'd be fine to use it on the USB 3 port.

 

Its a portable drive right? That means it can easily draw power from any of the three USB ports you have. The special powered port is only for charging devices like iPods, etc. when the computer itself is in standby/hibernate mode [maybe even when its off, though I can't confirm].

You can use that drive on any of the ports, preferably on the USB3.0 port as CGSDR pointed out [well since you have it anyway ] By the way that's a good drive you're purchasing - I myself couldn't find one so I had to settle for a 1TB Toshiba Canvio USB2.0

 

You should be able to charge a device with the laptop off. Not sure if it will charge if the laptops is off and unplugged, or if it does need to be on AC. Could potentially run your battery down if you unplugged it when it was low battery already and left something plugged in (though I'm sure they've got safeguards around that).

I've already started seeing cheap USB 3.0 portable hard drives around. If you can find USB 3.0 drives at Walmart (I can, shockingly), then they should be available everywhere on the cheap.

As for the amount of power, USB as a standard has a max power rating. All USB ports can deliver it.

 

Not really. I knew a friend who has a desktop which CANNOT run my Toshiba drive, or any HDD for that matter. It seems some motherboards have USB ports that are underpowered for some [lame] reason. Such motherboards need a special cable attachment that connects to two ports simultaneously.

Likewise, USB 2.0 gives 10 times more juice than USB 1.1 [1 amp i think] and the irony is the USB1.1 port on my ages old desktop runs my HDD comfortable but his USB2 doesn't weirdness ...

But in almost all scenarios, you're correct.

 

Huh. The reason I asked is because I plugged a keyboard into one of the USB 3.0 ports and it auto installed the basic driver but then wouldn't work. I uninstalled the driver and plugged it into the USB 2.0 (Power Share) port, and it worked perfectly. I assumed that the Power Share port gave more power to the keyboard and that the USB 3.0 ports couldn't supply enough power, but it might have been some other weird issue.

But anyway, thanks for the comments, I'm sure the driver will work fine.