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2.26 or 2.4 GHz / White plastic unibody enclosure

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MacBook USB Port problem;

One of my USB port (the one besides headphone jack) on macbook unibody late 2009 didnt work.

I have external drive, I plugged into. It worked fine on other port. But didn't work on the other one. my external drive not mounted. But the light indicator in my ext drive is on. it seems it doesn't totally die, I think it just low power or something. I tried to reset SMC or NVRAM but got nothing. any solution will be great. I'll be appreciate. Thank you

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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I think the different ports have different power available. External drives are not meant to be powered by laptop bus - get a self-powered USB HUB. You are asking/expecting an incredible amount of power to be supplied through a very fragile connection.

In general 2.5" laptop drives are designed to run with a lot less power than 3.5" desktop drives because they're usually used on battery power. They're slower, but a lot less power-hungry.

Now you want to run two such drives from one power source.

If the external enclosure you're buying contains a 2.5" drive then the amount of power that can be delivered over a USB connection should be sufficient to run the drive, but, some of these drives require the power from TWO USB ports. Hence, the recommendation to use a self (external) powered USB port.

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2 Comments:

thank you machead3 that's very informative. I'm sorry I think this is misleading to give an example how my external drive (2,5) work on my usb port.

Simply says that now my one usb port didn't work on my 8GB kingston flash-drive (but it worked on the other port)

I don't think I need a self-powered usb hub to run 8GB flashdrive

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You're correct you shouldn't need that much power for an 8GB flash drive... However that information was not available in your original question and I thought 'external drive' was just that. If there's misleading going on IMHO we are equally at fault.

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Joppi Irwanto Pratama will be eternally grateful.
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