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miawj · Feb 9, 2007, 11:40 AM

I read a description of USB that suggested the only difference was throughput and not power consumption/supply. Not sure I entirely believe that. I have a clamshell iMac with just USB 1.1 available. I saw an illustrated description of how to replace the internal hard drive. Think I'll stick to an external one! So I need a way to simultaneously connect an external USB 2 drive and a keyboard.

1) Can I use an independently powered USB 2 hub connected to the 1.1 socket?
2) (Less importantly) Can I use an unpowered USB 2 hub?
3) Can I use a powered USB 1.1 hub for a USB 2 external drive?

shifuimam · 02:19 PM

Use a hub. If the two things you're using need a lot of power, you might need a powered hub. I use a bus-powered hub with my clamshell iBook, and I can use a mouse and a keyboard simultaneously. A keyboard is really low-powered, and as long as you use an external hard drive with its own power supply (e.g. not a dual-USB setup where it's powered by one port and pushes data through another port), you'll be fine.

You can use any USB 1.1 hub with a USB 2.0 drive.

Also - with a little patience, it's not so terrible to upgrade the internal drive. It's more portable than carrying around an external drive, for sure!

mduell · Feb 9, 2007, 07:33 PM

1. Yes

2. Yes.

3. Yes, but painfully slow.

Railroader · Feb 9, 2007, 11:13 PM

That external drive will be painfully, excruciatingly, agonizingly slow as pointed out in the post above mine. I am serious. I thought something was wrong with my computer when I hooked up a USB 2 drive to a USB 1 port. It's THAT slow.

I would buy a new internal drive, put that in your computer, and put the old drive in an external case.

Railroader · Feb 9, 2007, 11:15 PM

BTW: What does a clamshell iMac look like?

miawj · Feb 10, 2007, 11:57 AM

Thanks, all. I will not be moving great screeds to and fro. I've used a thumb drive and it seems alright for transferring 100MB or less at a time. I recently noted on Ars Technica a correspondent complaining about changing the disk. If a technica-head is given head-aches then I know I'm beat.

The clamshell iMac was an obscure model only released in mediterranean Europe. It sported a scalloped base and a chrome monitor stem that could, optionally, be bought wrought to the form-factor of Uma Thurman. It was withdrawn from sale following a licensing conflict between Apple and Kilgore Trout.

miawj · Feb 10, 2007, 12:22 PM

Hmm, just realised, is the speed problem just for transferring large files or will there be an actual speed problem when hooking up to communicate just the file catalogue info for a disk with a few gigs of files?

shifuimam · Feb 10, 2007, 05:43 PM

It's not that it's difficult to replace a hard drive in an iBook...it's just time-consuming and rather tedious. With a little patience and the right tools, it's not that bad. Since I got my tangerine iBook, I have completely dismantled it at least five times. Once you do it a few times, you get the hang of it and it's much easier. It would be a good learning experience for you.

You will find that even accessing folders on a drive using USB 1.1 is slow. It's not unusable, but it takes awhile. If your iBook has a firewire port, do yourself a favor and get a firewire external drive case, or even one that does firewire AND USB 2.0.