I bought this usb drive to use with my digital photos. I work on a laptop and, because I take raw digital images, I wanted someplace to store my photos off of my machine. The logical solution was, of course, an external usb drive but, since my cat loves to jump on my lap or on the sofa when I am working, I worried about the possible damage to the drive from sudden movements. This was my solution to that problem. After reading some of the reviews I assumed that I would need two cables, one for data and one for power, and that there would be two usb connections on the drive. So, first off, let me be clear about what is and what is not needed to use this drive.
This drive itself has only a single usb 3.0 connection. The cable that comes with the drive is a Y cable with two connectors for the usb connections on the computer, but only one connection on the drive itself. As I said, the Y cable has two computer connections, but the wires are not the same. The thicker one is for data and the thinner one for power. So, to check the drive, I connected the usb connection on the drive and then first connected the data cable to the computer. To my surprise the drive spun up and my laptop identified it as a Transcend usb drive even though I had not, at this point, connected the power cable. Since I was surprised I did some checking and found out that the drive worked properly without the power connection to the computer being plugged in at all. I then checked the drive with the Y cable with both connections and the drive worked properly. I then tried the drive with a spare usb 3.0 cable I had for some other usb drives and the drive also worked properly.
If I had read the documentation before trying the drive I would have seen that the second wire is only needed for some machines which don't supply sufficient power to run the drive itself. Others, like my laptop, work perfectly with only a standard usb 3.0 cable.
I tested speed transfers using both the provided cable, with both connections, and a standard usb 3.0 cable. I found that I had a transfer speed of about 63MB/s with both data and power connections and about 10% lower with only the single connection. Since I was transferring different data in the two transfers I cannot be sure that the difference was the power connection as it could also have been the different data. Fewer large files should transfer more quickly than more smaller files and that is what my testing was comparing. Given that I cannot even be sure that there is a difference of speed in the transfers. The speed I saw on my laptop was about the same as the other usb 3.0 drives that I have used with the same kind of file transfers.
In summary, not all computers will need to use both the data and power connections to use this drive. I assume stronger machines provide enough power to the usb connections to run this drive alone and that relieves my concern about losing this cable. Since some of the reviews I read on this product were misleading I thought I should quickly post what I saw when using this drive.
I have not had much time to use it so I am not yet sure it will continue to function properly and, because of that, I will update this review if needed. But my experience since the drive arrived yesterday afternoon is that the drive functions as well as any other usb 3.0 drive I have, transfers data as quickly and seems to be a lot more rugged. The ruberized grip on the drive is easy to handle and should prevent me from accidentally dropping it. As of this point I can see no reason to give this drive anything other than 5 stars.
| Hard Drive | 2 TB Portable |
|---|---|
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 1 |
