Most Reliable USB Bus powered Hard drive

[CranBerry]

A few days ago I bought the USB powered WD Elements Portable SE 500GB USB3.0 (WDBPCK5000ABK) external drive.
No problems. Drive spins down after a couple of time (I don't know exactly when, but I think after 30 - 60 minutes) and works flawlessly after a spin up.

[eddyther]

Iomega Prestige 35192, 500 gb and usb 3.0.
Comes with extra usb port for extra power suply, but no need tu plug with the touch.
Working well. I didn't try sleep mode. I have to dig a little bit on that.
Very thin and silent... and aluminum black.
edit: after a short talk in the Iomega forum it seems that sleep mode is not implemented

[jean2]

Hi,

I quickly tested the following two USB powered drives with the Touch :
Toshiba Canvio Basics 750 GB E05A075BAU2XK - formatted as EXT-3
Toshiba Canvio 1.0 TB USB 3.0 HDTC610XL3B1 - formatted as NTFS (default)
Both seems to be working fine. I only did a quick test scanning a 9k track collection. The ext3 formatted drives feels faster than my old 640 GB drive (which is now also ext3), and the NTFS feels slower, not a scientific test.
On the 750 GB, smart monitoring was disabled, and I had to enable it (under Linux using smarctl).
I was worried that the USB 3.0 drive would not work, especially that the review complain a lot about flaky cable connector, but it seems to work fine.

Also, my original Toshiba has now been attached to the Touch for over two years 24/7, went through all the firmware upgrades, collection updates, power outage, reformat to ext3, and it is still working fine. I'm pleased.

Jean