(OT) Portable USB drive (makes no sense)

[Paintedcow]

I just bought one of those portable USB hard drives that plug into a USB port. It's a 1tb made by Western Digital. (Passport Drive). It says its for Windows Vista, 7 and 8. (It was on clearance so Win10 is not included). Anyhow, my newest OS is XP. I plugged it into my XP machine and it was immediately recognized. So, I dont need Vista or newer. It works fine on XP. But it comes with included software. Maybe that software requires Vista ir higher, but I never use any of that included software anyhow.

However there is one peculiar thing, which makes no sense. The driver for it, is *ON* the drive. So, if I actually needed the driver, how the heck can I get to it. That's pretty stupid.

Just to see what would happen, I plugged it into my older computer with Windows 98 and 2000. I did not even try it using Win98 because 98 lacks support for most USB devices, regardless of their size or age. But booting it to Win2000, I was suspecting I would need to take that driver off of it from the XP machine, and place it on the 2K computer. Much to my surprise, after stumbling around for a minute, then asking for a driver, I just hit cancel, and I had full access to that drive.

So, first I asked what good the driver is when it's on the drive I'm trying to use. Now I ask what's the purpose of the driver all all, since I accessed the drive from both Windows 2K and XP.

This drive is also for Macintosh. I thought a Mac computer requires a different drive format. That's even more puzzling!

[bob_villain]

Any OS will "look" for a driver in the "usual" places (likely folders)...if it doesn't find a driver you have to point it in the right direction...on the USB drive itself. Win98 had fairly good USB support...95 did not.

[gfretwell]

The problem with W98 is it won't talk to a NTFS drive. I agree with the OP, they are referring to the bundled software and it might run on XP anyway. I always wipe that stuff out too.

[Stormin Mormon]

I've had external drives. Some how, the first time I use them, they install their own drivers.

Seems to work OK. I just smile, be happy, and get on with life.

If the drive really fails, there is a way to get to computer management through control panel. Been a while since I used that. You can find and reformat a drive that doesn't otherwise show up in windows explorer.

- . Christopher A. Young learn more about Jesus .

. .

[bob_villain]

He was asking about drivers and I wasn't commenting on included software...

[John Albert]

The standard "Mac format" is called HFS+, but that cannot be read/written to on Windows machines without special software.

The Mac OS, however, -can- read/write at least some Windows formats (and can read some others).

It makes sense to have a copy of the disk drivers "on the drive itself". The idea is that:

- you plug it into the computer

- computer queries connection, discovers drive, loads drivers

- drive mounts on desktop and is ready for use...

[gfretwell]

The mass store driver is in XP already. On W98 you need to install nusb33e.exe or some other similar driver. When you plug in a drive on the USB, you see it loading the driver but that is coming from c:\Windows\system32 or maybe another similar location

[Paintedcow]

The drive is NTFS. Will a Mac read that?

I left the driver on the drive, but removed all the extra software. I did zip it and save a copy on a flash drive just in case it's needed.

[Retired]

I don't know the how and why of it, but I use a flash drive to move files between a Mac mini w/ El Capitan, and a Win 7 laptop all the time. (.jpg, .xls, .doc )

If you have a Mac and a Win machine, try it.

[makolber]

I think the computer is able to READ and WRITE the USB drive without the driver. It already knows how to talk to USB.

The driver on the USB drive probably enables "extra features" like encyption or other stuff you may not want to use anyway. But if you wanted those extra features, you would need the driver.

[trader_4]

+1

That's how it's worked for a long time now, the driver for USB drives is in the OS, part of plug-n-play. I suspect whatever is on that drive is likely additional utilities. It might have an improved driver, but not at all surprised that the drive works by just plugging it in. That is all I've done with various USB drives, smartphones that look like drives, etc.

[Scott Lurndal]

There are a number of factors that play into drive compatability:

0) Host to Drive communications interface (RLL, MFM, IDE/EIDE/ATA, Serial ATA (SATA), Parallel SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), FiberChannel, iSCSI, FCoE, and the Universal Serial Bus (USB)).

USB Mass Storage devices leveraged the SCSI command set to enable resuse of parts of the operating system storage stack (as did the ATA packet interface - ATAPI).

1) Low-level format (usually done at the factory) which breaks each track on the drive into fixed length sectors (usually 512 bytes each, with larger drives 4096 bytes is becoming common, but for legacy systems 100-byte and 180-byte sectors have been used in the past). 2) File-system format which organizes the data on the device by providing a table-of-contents and managing the unallocated space. Typically a new drive will be high-level formatted with the microsoft File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem as pretty much any modern operating system will have the capability of reading and writing a FAT filesystem. Other file systems include HPFS, NTFS, S5, UFS, VxFS, XFS, EXTx, BTTRFS, et alia.

The software provided on the drive is usually backup software, encryption software or software designed to enable non-standard features on the drive.

[Paintedcow]

I dont have a Mac!

I know .jpg . gif . mp3 .htm are universal. I suppose .doc is too, as well as .txt. (not sure what a .xls is used for).

[Paintedcow]

I found that on XP it just works. But on Win2000, I would have to go thru the "install new hardware" routine every time I plugged it in. I installed the driver for Win2000, and now I can just plug it in and go. That software said it's only for Vista and higher, but that driver worked fine on Win2000. Win98 cant read that drive no matter what, because it's NTFS formatted, and I doubt I could format it to FAT32 due to it;s size. (Or would have to have multiple partitions).

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

You need a driver to use the drive with Windows 98. Windows ME, 2000, and later shouldn't need it.

BTW, the presence of that driver (already in the OS) may be the only advantage of Windows ME over 98.

I believe Macintosh (as well as Linux, don't forget that) support FAT formats.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

If you can do that (point the OS to something on the drive itself), it seems that you don't need the driver.

A lot of USB stuff I got around that time (when Win 98 was new) had separate driver disks for 95 and 98.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I do that frequently, "Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management". This IS available on Windows 10, although they make it harder to get to.

[Retired]

These are all application file types, which have nothing to do with disk formats. .xls is an MS Excel spreadsheet file type, which can also be created/read by such free apps as OpenOffice or Libre on Macs or Win PCs

[Mark Lloyd]

So it actually doesn't need the drivers, since it can access the disk without them.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

I seem to have heard of that filetype. Proprietary Excel spreadsheet format?