Bus-Powered USB-C 3.5" HDD Enclosures?

[smoothbit]

I've been using 2.5" external drives exclusively for at least the last 10 years but I just recently took the 8TB 3.5" HDD one out of my Time Capsule.

8TB is still a useful capacity but one of the things I've liked about leaving 3.5" USB drives behind is that I've not needed to use external power supplies, all the 2.5" USB drives I have are bus-powered.

Since USB-C can power entire MacBooks, does anyone know of any bus-powered 3.5" SATA USB-C enclosures? I can't find any.

 

[EugW]

I've been using 2.5" external drives exclusively for at least the last 10 years but I just recently took the 8TB 3.5" HDD one out of my Time Capsule.

8TB is still a useful capacity but one of the things I've liked about leaving 3.5" USB drives behind is that I've not needed to use external power supplies, all the 2.5" USB drives I have are bus-powered.

Since USB-C can power entire MacBooks, does anyone know of any bus-powered 3.5" SATA USB-C enclosures? I can't find any.

I’ve never seen one. That would take a lot of power, and remember that USB-C only needs to provide 15 Watts standard (and some USB-C ports don’t even provide that). Most people don’t consider 3.5” hard drives to be very portable, and external USB-C SSDs are almost ubiquitous now and are way, way faster, so a bus powered 3.5” drive would be completely pointless. It would not make sense to create a bus powered 3.5” drive enclosure that constantly risks insufficient power, when in 2024 it is not something meant to be used a truly portable device anyway. Almost nobody except you would buy it.

BTW, these days people generally aren’t using bus powered 2.5” drives either. They are also usually pretty slow by today’s standards, and even some of those when used on USB-A ports (4.5 Watts) also risk running out of power.

 

[PaulD-UK]

The USB ports on a computer normally only output 5v.
A 2.5" drive will typically use only 5v, for both motor and circuit board.
A 3.5" drive will typically use 12v for the motor and 5v for the circuit board.

USB-C PD computer ports can operate at higher voltages but only to USB-C PD compliant devices, which 3.5" HD enclosures aren't. So you have a problem, 12v is normally sourced from an external PSU.

I've never heard of a 'smart' PD-enabled 3.5" enclosure, because by the time USB-C PD became a thing, HDs were being replaced by SSDs and 2.5" 5v HDs were large enough to fill the demand for cheaper/larger storage.

 

[smoothbit]

Accidental Double Post.

 

[smoothbit]

Yeah, like I say, I've not used a 3.5" HDD in over ten years myself, so I understand there's too little demand. I did some more reading on the power requirements so understand why such an enclosure only exists as a DIY hobby project. Oh well, maybe I'll just leave the 8TB HDD in a drawer, that way it won't need any power at all 😉

 

[EugW]

The USB ports on a computer normally only output 5v.
A 2.5" drive will typically use only 5v, for both motor and circuit board.
A 3.5" drive will typically use 12v for the motor and 5v for the circuit board.

I’m curious. In theory, couldn’t a step up converter be used? As a layperson I just assumed they are small enough to fit inside something like that, although you might end up losing about 20% of the power.

 

[smoothbit]

I've never heard of a 'smart' PD-enabled 3.5" enclosure, because by the time USB-C PD became a thing, HDs were being replaced by SSDs and 2.5" 5v HDs were large enough to fill the demand for cheaper/larger storage.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, and yep, it's a case of USB-C PD coming along too late for 3.5" HDDs, they seem to be only used inside desktop PCs and NAS devices nowadays.

 

[PaulD-UK]

@EugW "couldn’t a step up converter be used?"

Because a 7200rpm 3.5" HD can take 20-25 watts during start up.
Not going to happen from a 15w port. Especially an Apple one...

 

[EugW]

@EugW "couldn’t a step up converter be used?"

Because a 7200rpm 3.5" HD can take 20-25 watts during start up.
Not going to happen from a 15w port. Especially an Apple one...

Wow. I didn't realize they can use so much power. Mind you perhaps some of the so-called green drives could theoretically work. Now you've gotten me curious. I'll have to pull out some of my old external 3.5" drives and attach a Kill-A-Watt to them to see.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

Wow. I didn't realize they can use so much power. Mind you perhaps some of the so-called green drives could theoretically work. Now you've gotten me curious. I'll have to pull out some of my old external 3.5" drives and attach a Kill-A-Watt to them to see.

It's not so much the standard power draw, it's the startup. Motors (DC in this case) have high current draws when starting due to a lack of EMF pushing back against the applied voltage from the magnetic field. Once they are running at operating speed, they can really low wattage.

 

[EugW]

It's not so much the standard power draw, it's the startup. Motors (DC in this case) have high current draws when starting due to a lack of EMF pushing back against the applied voltage from the magnetic field. Once they are running at operating speed, they can really low wattage.

So, my OEM Apple Hitachi 2 TB drive from 2010 draws 22 Watts at startup in a SATA dock, and it idles at 12 W. So even just the idle power draw would be problematic.

My Western Digital 640 GB drive from 2010 draws 17 Watts at startup in the same SATA dock, and idles at 8 W.

Both are 7200 rpm drives I believe.

P.S. I used the 2 TB drive for a backup. It took over 12 hours to complete the backup. That backup will just reside off site as a secondary (tertiary?) backup, likely never to be used again.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

I've been using 2.5" external drives exclusively for at least the last 10 years but I just recently took the 8TB 3.5" HDD one out of my Time Capsule.

8TB is still a useful capacity but one of the things I've liked about leaving 3.5" USB drives behind is that I've not needed to use external power supplies, all the 2.5" USB drives I have are bus-powered.

Since USB-C can power entire MacBooks, does anyone know of any bus-powered 3.5" SATA USB-C enclosures? I can't find any.

Personally I go out of my way to use non-computer-powered external drives or busses in any long term desktop setup.

A) I prefer not to add stress to the computer's internal electronics and move the drive's power supply heat to the computer.

B) Losing data, even backed up, is a PITA. All drives fail, so a ten-y-o drive can essentially stay on the shelf IMO, used only as a backup of a backup.

C) Tech evolves rapidly. Modern SSDs are much faster and inexpensive. My experience says that faster is good; it seems that less anomalies occur with faster operation.

 

[EugW]

Personally I go out of my way to use non-computer-powered external drives or busses in any long term desktop setup.

I used to do that too, but these days they are becoming increasingly difficult to find. I guess that makes sense since the drives use less power, and now USB-C provides way more power than USB-A did. You can use powered hubs though.

BTW, back in the day I was running a bus powered FireWire SSD drive as a boot drive, since the iMac it was attached to had a hard drive and no USB 3 ports. That seemed to work fine most of the time, but every so often it would just completley lock up, requiring a reboot. Luckily, it also had the option for external DC power so I added that, and then it ran perfectly for a year until I got a new Mac with internal SSD.

Eventually I got the courage to disassemble the iMac and install an SSD, and now that 2010 27" Core i7 iMac runs great with a Samsung SATA SSD I just happened to have lying around. Too bad it's stuck on High Sierra. (I didn't bother with the hacks to install something more recent, partially because the GPU is not supported.)

 

[MallardDuck]

One other thought - How old is that drive? If it's more than 4 years, you might not want to rely on it - Time Capsules ran quite hot, and it may be getting towards EOL. Scratch disk use sure, but I don't know that I'd rely on it for solo backups.

 

[ignatius345]

One other thought - How old is that drive? If it's more than 4 years, you might not want to rely on it - Time Capsules ran quite hot, and it may be getting towards EOL. Scratch disk use sure, but I don't know that I'd rely on it for solo backups.

My thought exactly. Seems like a lot of work to repurpose an HDD that probably has a of mileage on it.

 

[smoothbit]

One other thought - How old is that drive? If it's more than 4 years, you might not want to rely on it - Time Capsules ran quite hot, and it may be getting towards EOL. Scratch disk use sure, but I don't know that I'd rely on it for solo backups.

My thought exactly. Seems like a lot of work to repurpose an HDD that probably has a of mileage on it.

Nah, it's actually the opposite, where I bought that 8TB HDD years ago, it sat in its box for a couple of years before I ever installed it in the Time Capsule, and then because it was so loud I literally never backed-up any of my Macs to it, the Time Capsule has effectively just been an AirPort Base Station this whole time. So it's basically a new drive, though it has been kept nice and warm sitting in the Time Capsule 😉

 

[smoothbit]

BTW, back in the day I was running a bus powered FireWire SSD drive as a boot drive, since the iMac it was attached to had a hard drive and no USB 3 ports. That seemed to work fine most of the time, but every so often it would just completley lock up, requiring a reboot. Luckily, it also had the option for external DC power so I added that, and then it ran perfectly for a year until I got a new Mac with internal SSD.

Back when I was using a 2018 Mac mini and for most of the time I've been using this 2018 MacBook Pro, I was running from a bus-powered external SSD connected via USB 3. It was mostly reliable but would lock up every so often, which was annoying. Now I'm running off the MacBook Pro's 500GB internal SSD but have most of my home folder on the 4TB external drive, it's not ideal but it works.

 

[smoothbit]

Personally I go out of my way to use non-computer-powered external drives or busses in any long term desktop setup.

A) I prefer not to add stress to the computer's internal electronics and move the drive's power supply heat to the computer.

B) Losing data, even backed up, is a PITA. All drives fail, so a ten-y-o drive can essentially stay on the shelf IMO, used only as a backup of a backup.

C) Tech evolves rapidly. Modern SSDs are much faster and inexpensive. My experience says that faster is good; it seems that less anomalies occur with faster operation.

The reason I prefer bus-powered is that I prefer to not have lots of external power supplies, but you make good points. If those external power supplies were just standard USB-C that would be something different, but they're always barrel connectors that are ever so slightly different from each other.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

There are MANY 3.5" HDD enclosures that are relatively dirt cheap on Amazon and all over the web. Instead of thinking "portable" storage, what if you made it some stationary storage? For example, attach it to a desktop or perhaps mostly-retired, older Mac, load it up with media and let it be your central media hub for your household: ripped movies, music collection, home movies, photos, etc. Put it all there and stream it to AppleTVs and other Apple tech around the home.

Maybe get something with several 3.5" bays and let that be the first of a JBOD setup to which you can add other HDDs if you need more household storage in the future. Maybe something like this 2 HDD + 3 m.2 enclosure? Or if you have maybe more than 2 old HDDs laying around, perhaps a bigger one with more bays like this one?

Or consider a NAS enclosure from someone like Synology or QNAP or similar and let it be starter storage (again stationary) to share with any and all wireless (or wired) devices in the household. A NAS like Synology supports Time Machine so you could still use it as a TM backup drive to which you can backup all Macs in the household. Or add the Channels DVR option to make it your whole home DVR, where YOU control what you record, how long you have to retain it, etc. NAS can be your own "cloud" too that you fully own/control that doesn't require forever rent. So while the hardware may be fixed location, the files can still be mobile via your own cloud.

There's plenty of uses for big storage that remains stationary. It won't be SSD fast or mobile but it can certainly hold an important, useful place in a household or office. "Think different"

 

[shadowboi]

Wonderful idea and way better than any cloud storage can get. Also good thing is that almost any Mac released in the last 15 years will work just fine for that. The only thing I would say is that I would not trust HDDs. These things work only if you never touch them. Once I had to move quickly and packed my main HDD with all the photos and data into backpack. The road was pretty bumpy. Ended up with years of lost footage. Hopefully I had backups of best shots on my usb flash drives. Since then I decided to invest fully into flash storage – USB sticks, drives, even SD cards. “It just works” in real life. This type of disks also has its own issues – it is better to connect them to something once in a while to keep data alive.

I have only few HDDs left now. A 500gb 2.5 drive that I use with my iMac to load old Parallels version and Windows XP for some vintage games and also the 120gb drive I salvaged from old Macbook White 2007 that died for some reason

 

[smoothbit]

There are MANY 3.5" HDD enclosures that are relatively dirt cheap on Amazon and all over the web. Instead of thinking "portable" storage, what if you made it some stationary storage? For example, attach it to a desktop or perhaps mostly-retired, older Mac, load it up with media and let it be your central media hub for your household: ripped movies, music collection, home movies, photos, etc. Put it all there and stream it to AppleTVs and other Apple tech around the home.

Maybe get something with several 3.5" bays and let that be the first of a JBOD setup to which you can add other HDDs if you need more household storage in the future. Maybe something like this 2 HDD + 3 m.2 enclosure? Or if you have maybe more than 2 old HDDs laying around, perhaps a bigger one with more bays like this one?

Or consider a NAS enclosure from someone like Synology or QNAP or similar and let it be starter storage (again stationary) to share with any and all wireless (or wired) devices in the household. A NAS like Synology supports Time Machine so you could still use it as a TM backup drive to which you can backup all Macs in the household. Or add the Channels DVR option to make it your whole home DVR, where YOU control what you record, how long you have to retain it, etc. NAS can be your own "cloud" too that you fully own/control that doesn't require forever rent. So while the hardware may be fixed location, the files can still be mobile via your own cloud.

There's plenty of uses for big storage that remains stationary. It won't be SSD fast or mobile but it can certainly hold an important, useful place in a household or office. "Think different"

I've considered all those, especially a NAS, but the thing that stops me is that my apartment doesn't have anywhere to hide such a device where the click-clack-clicking of the hard drive wouldn't be really annoying; that's why I didn't backup to my Time Capsule all this time, am only doing so now that I put an 8TB SSD inside it 🙃

So instead I'm thinking to use the 8TB HDD as a once-a-month backup drive, where I plug it in via USB directly to my MacBook. The reason I preferred the idea of a bus-powered USB enclosure was so that I didn't have to keep track of yet another external power supply. But so, that not being possible, I'll manage to keep track of yet another external power supply 😉

Hmm, though for fun, I do have a 17" iMac G5 from 2005, I wonder what capacity drive Mac OS X 10.5 supports 😜

 

[EugW]

You can get a decent external 4 TB USB-C SSD for US$140.

 

[smoothbit]

Wonderful idea and way better than any cloud storage can get. Also good thing is that almost any Mac released in the last 15 years will work just fine for that. The only thing I would say is that I would not trust HDDs. These things work only if you never touch them. Once I had to move quickly and packed my main HDD with all the photos and data into backpack. The road was pretty bumpy. Ended up with years of lost footage. Hopefully I had backups of best shots on my usb flash drives. Since then I decided to invest fully into flash storage – USB sticks, drives, even SD cards. “It just works” in real life. This type of disks also has its own issues – it is better to connect them to something once in a while to keep data alive.

I have only few HDDs left now. A 500gb 2.5 drive that I use with my iMac to load old Parallels version and Windows XP for some vintage games and also the 120gb drive I salvaged from old Macbook White 2007 that died for some reason

I also prefer to avoid HDDs, that's why all my main working drives are SSDs. The few hard drives I still have in use are 2.5" ones, a 4TB one that now serves as an occasional backup of my 4TB home directory SSD, and a 2TB one as an occasional backup of my 2TB media SSD. They used to be for other purposes, but losing too much data this year has made me think to actually backup to them regularly 😉

 

[smoothbit]

You can get a decent external 4 TB USB-C SSD for US$140.

Nice! I don't need more storage at the moment, but that's how much they were new ~1.5 years ago, so hopefully new prices will drop soon too. I bought my 8TB SSD for 300€ and that was a nice price 🙂