Hello, Just as a heads-up, I purchased two 750 GB Seagate Expansion Portable Drives (Model ST907504EXA101-RK | 750 GB) in order back up a data set on a ThinkPad T61 running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. The T61 was docked and running on AC power.
Neither of the hard disk drives seemed to properly spin up if plugged into the T61's own USB ports. I went to grab a USB Y-cable with data and power leads and a mini-USB connector instead from an external DVD drive to provide additional power, but it turns out the USB connector on the Seagate disk drive was recessed in the casing so the connector from this and other cables couldn't fit. I seem to recall hearing of recessed USB connectors on the MacBook Air but this is the first time I have seen such a thing on any device. I returned the two hard disk drives and exchanged them for two 750 GB Western Digital My Passport Essential SE drives (Model WDBABM7500ABK) which worked fine with their supplied cables. These hard disk drives had the slimmer micro-USB cables, instead of mini-USB cables normally seen with external hard disk drives. I am unsure of whether got two bad Seagate hard disk drives (shipping damage, perhaps?) but as I noted, the two drives from Western Digital worked just fine. One thought was that the Seagate disk drives might be 12.5mm units that requires more than 500 ma of current to spin up, which probably makes them safe for desktops and current notebooks but bad for older units. Hopefully, this saves fellow list members from having to troubleshoot the same problem. This is the first time I have had a problem with a Seagate product in a while but I do not buy pre-built external drives so maybe the market is different for those. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
