I recently purchased a Hitachi portable USB drive for my motifES8. After some hacking and difficulties, i noticed that different USB connect cables from different manufacturers bring very different results!

The Hitachi portable USB connected to the motif without an external power supply and works great running off the Motif WITH IT’S OWN CABLE, which is a Y type cable. The USB Y cable has a standard USB conn on one end, and a standard USB on the other end of one side of the Y and a mini5-pin (the tiny conn) on the other side of the Y.

However, if I connected the same drive and the same Y cable to my XP desktop machine, the performance is very flaky, with intermittent mouse action, data redundancy errors, etc. It kinda works but not very well!

AND THEN, if I got hold of a straight USB interface cable (with the standard USB conn on one end and the mini-5-pin on the other end, for connecting to the drive) such as is supplied by HP with it’s portable USB drive, (in stores the cable is called a USB 5pMini-B) then I got GREAT performance connecting to my XP machine, but it didn’t work with the Motif! I connected the hitachi drive with this straight USB cable and the Motif told me the drive had no available space—zero gigs available!

If you buy a USB drive with a straight USB 5pmini-B cable in the box, chances are it won’t work on the Motif.

CONCLUSION: My method of working with this (or any) USB drive, will be to use Hitachi’s Y cable when connecting to the motif and a straight USB 5pMini-B when connecting to my XP desktop computer. I hope this helps someone. Through trial and error I found out how to make this work.

best

c-post

Interesting.
Is that drive a real disk and how many Gb is its capacity?

;JOOP!

It’s a 320GB external, portable USB harddrive about the size of a pack of cigarettes, the smallest I could find, (59.99—fry’s) unless you wanna start getting into thumb drives. So if I understand you correctly, for that size disk yes, i think there would have to be a spinning platter inside there.

One detail which I didn’t think about: the purpose of the Y type USB cable is to receive power only, not data, on the other side of the USB y. So for all I know, the situation I described above probably applies to any USB Y cable vs a straight cable from any manufacturer.

c-post