Orange Planet

MaYesterday I was telling Amol about my external HDD enclosure: it’s a Cooler Master X Craft 250 Lite in black. It’s pretty standard fair for the most part: it’s got a metal shell with a tray and activity LED that holds a single 2.5″ hard drive. You can then drop in the 2.5″ hard drive of your choice - I’ve got a Fujitsu MHV-something-something.

But anyways, the great thing about this thing - besides the fact that it’s cheap and brand-name, is that you can run it off a single USB jack, given that your HDD isn’t a power-hungry, 320GB, 7200RPM behemoth. For those kind of drives, there’s an extra USB plug - on the SAME CABLE - that lets your drive pull more juice from a second USB port. 

Why is this important at all? It’s because I’m totally fed up with the amount of periphery that our electronic devices tend to drag along with them. It seems like every little gadget has it’s own little cable - and even worse, it’s own proprietary power brick - that you have to drag along if you want to use the damn thing. Why can’t we all just use the same blasted cables?

I’ve been trying to consolidate here: my camera, PSP, external HDD, and phone can all do data transfer over the USB. The phone and HDD can even take power. My printer still needs a different USB cable. The problem is that the cameria, PSP, and printer still need their own power bricks. I mean, I can understand the brick for the printer, but the hell can’t I charge my camera or PSP from USB?

Well, ok, maybe it’s because of USB’s relatively low power spec, but I don’t mind waiting longer for my devices to charge if it means dropping the effin power brick. I guess the problem is that the USB is just a serial bus. Where the hell is my Universal Power Bus?

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