I have an old DELL C600 which is my backup. I wanted to install a Samsung DVD Writer on it but it required a USB 2 PCMCIA card. I installed the card all seemed great.
Now I plugged in the Samsung SE-S084 with just one of the plugs and the machine just cratered to reboot black screen. After doing this a few times I thought that perhaps the drivers on the card are the issue. Well I went through the update process in “Unplug or Eject” menu and came to the conclusion that this is not the issue.
If I plug it in on the USB-1 version HUB there is no problem but then it will not work. I tried on plug on USB2 and the second plug on USB1, but in this case the laptop crashes.
Then I read this comment on a forum in the NET.
"The problem is that a DVD Burner is about the ultimate power-sapping device you can conncet to a USB port, and expect to get it’s power there too.
Having cables for bi-portal operation is fine, but if the laptop has a relatively small battery like the EEE’s, and may be fairly depleted, and is itself drawing the majority of the battery power just to do whatever it’s already doing - then the addition of the burner is likely to crash the whole kaboodle, especially if the user wants to burn disks rather than read data.
It all comes back to the same thing with the EEE’s. They’re not powerhouses, and they’re certainly not designed to supply significant amounts of power output to any sort of ancillary accessories.
The LG drive I chose draws 1.6amps at 5 volts, which is eight watts.
Take that into comparison with the 2.5 watts the Atom CPU demands, and it’s easy to understand how it can dramatically increase current demand on the battery, which is designed to trickle discharge fairly slowly."
What options do I have to power this thing?
