i spotted this potential question while lurking in another thread, so i thought a new topic was in order where we can all share which products we've found to work with our scrolls and hopefully give people the advice they were looking for. i realise i may be wrong but these are my findings to share:
the scroll appears to use USB 1.1 (going by the terrible transfer speeds
)i've used an old IBM Travelstar 40gb 2.5" IDE laptop hard drive from my old packard bell (i overclocked it too far and it died a horrible death
) mostly for carting around music between home and the car. this drive sits in a cheap ebay drive caddy.the reason it works?
the output voltage of the scroll on the usb host is 5v 500mah (standard usb 1.1 spec)*** i realise that the scroll can charge over the 'main' usb socket but can it output? or is it just charging one-way and data transfer?
only some laptop drives are capable of just having 500mah to play with so they can be powered DIRECTLY from the scroll without external power adapters. some very old laptop drives ive found seem to be 1000mah, as also most of the more recent ones are too. its a question of getting one from a reputable place where you can get detailed information about the product before you buy! as for SATA laptop drives...i've no idea but i'll leave that upto you good people to find out!
in summary a 2.5" hard drive with a power consumption of 500mah should be all you need, if you can find one...
i feel abit like Justin Long in DieHard 4.0, carrying around that little bag full of tricks
*** im under the impression that USB 2.0 also carries 500mah hence why almost all USB 2.0 enclosures will come with a 'Y' cable or similar attempt to get the extra power needed for the larger/more powerfull drives today...but almost all USB sticks/pendrives are backwards compatible and capable of running on just 500mah (even the huge capacity ones)***
