What is typical power consumption of 2.5″ laptop external hard drive connected to USB socket?

Question: What is the approximate power and current consumption of a 2.5″ laptop external Hard Drive 7200RPM SATA (300Gb), connected to a laptop USB port as an external hard drive?

I’ve heard that using a regular HDD connected to laptop’s USB socket as external drive isn’t very good for motherboard, due to extra load on motherboard as the HDD requires much more power to drive, when compared with SSD drives or USB flash drives.

Here is some information about power consumption:

Answer: Your solution here is to measure the power. I can see two ways to achieve that.

Make up a USB breakout cable that you can use with your digital multi-meter to measure the voltage and current supplied from the USB port to the external drive.

Purchase one of the inexpensive USB test meters that displays voltage and current for you. One example of these meters can be seen here on Amazon.

Once you have voltage in Volts and current in Amps just multiply the two numbers together to get power in Watts.

What is typical power consumption of 2.5″ laptop external hard drive connected to USB socket?

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