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General discussion

External Hard Drive exceeding power limit of USB hub port

Jan 28, 2007 10:37AM PST

I just bought a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 250 GB external hard drive. As soon as I plugged it into my laptop (Dell Inspiron) I received a power surge notification that a device had exceeded the power limit of the USB hub port. Does this mean my laptop does not have enough power to work with the hard drive?

Discussion is locked

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That means ...
Jan 28, 2007 4:18PM PST
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External Hard Drive exceeding power limit
Feb 1, 2007 7:27PM PST

There is a possibility that when you connected the external HD to your laptop, the power surge might've been created by the HD motor trying to start up from a low RPM. When the motor is trying to accelerate the disks, the motor will draw more current than usual to get the disks rotating. However, when the disks are at full speed, the current drawn will be much less because all the motor needs to do it keep the disks spinning at a constant rate. Also, since your laptop was probably on at the time you plugged the HD in, your laptop might've already been seeing a certain amount of load being applied to the USB by other devices (if any were connected) and might've considered that load level to be normal. When you added a considerable amount of load from the HD trying to start up, it might've seen this load to be unusual and then give you the warning.

The solution I would try first is to already have the HD plugged in during boot...and then once the operating system is up and running, see if the drive works fine. If there is still a surge notification then I would try connecting an external powered USB hub. If this fails, there might be something wrong with the external HD because there are power draw specifications for USB ports and I'm sure that these HD manufacturers have paid attention to adhering to them

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External Hard Drive exceeding power limit of USB hub port
Feb 1, 2007 8:07PM PST

I have a similar problem with one of my external hard drives. I unplug the USB cable from the external drive before turning it's power on. After a 30 seconds or so I plug in the USB cable back in and it works fine.

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problem solved
Feb 3, 2007 6:59AM PST

I ended up calling tech support, and they weren't able to identify the problem. They told me it may have been a defective product, so I exchanged it, and now I have one that works fine. Thanks for all the input.

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External Hard Drive exceeding power limit of USB hub port
Oct 8, 2008 12:38PM PDT

I had the same problem today, i took my hard drive back, got another one ( a different brand altogether)still the same message. i have a dell inspiron 8600.
I have reached the conclusion that it is the dell crappy good for nothing ******** piece of **** of a computer. once again, dell screws us and we can't do anything about it.