Solved How can I recover a lost USB disk remotely?

Unfortunately you will need to get a USB 3 hub to get the speed.

Ghot said:

if the files are that important that you need to access them remotely... move them to an internal drive... if no other solution presents itself.

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Or use the cloud.

Hopefully one of the USB hubs I have already is USB 3.0, I will check at the afternoon when back home from work.

The free cloud is 15GB (I think) and I don't want to pay for more. Plus uploading large video files to the cloud could take ages and I don't have this amount of patience or time.

Quick Summary:

In general, you can still often use a USB 3 device on a USB 2 port, but you will have reduced speed. For many devices, this is not something that is critical, unless that device absolutely requires the higher speed of a USB 3 port. However, one thing that can easily get overlooked is the fact that a USB 2 port can only supply half the current that a USB 3 port can. Put another way, a USB 3 port can supply the same amount of power as 2 USB 2 ports and some devices such as hard drives and Blu-ray writers may absolutely need that additional power for reliable operation.

Something else very important: If you decide to get a USB 3 hub, I would strongly suggest getting a hub that comes with an AC adapter rather than one that draws power from the USB port to which it is connected. The reason for this is that if the hub does not have its own power source, then the single port on the computer into which the hub is connected will have to supply the power to ALL devices connected to that hub. That's fine if you are connecting several devices with very small power requirements (keyboard, mouse, flash drive, etc.) but as soon as you connect more power-hungry devices you can have problems again.

I hope that this helps!

Thank you for your advice. I do have an external BD-R XL USB 3.0 drive that unless is connected to the USB 3.0 port to get as much power as it needs it cannot properly read the disc inside, let alone be able to burn any data!

One more thing that I should point out. If your computer has USB-C ports, it possible (but not guaranteed) that this port can output more power than even a USB 3 Type A port. You would have to check the specs for your system to determine if this is the case.

By way of example, here are comparisons:

USB 2 port: Can supply 2.5W (watts) of power
USB 3 port: Can supply 5.0W of power
USB-C port on a Dell XPS 13 can supply 45W
USB-C port on a MacBook Pro can supply 87W
USB-C ports on some wall chargers can supply as high as 240W (!) using a special USB-C cable with PD 3.1 support.

spapakons said:

Thank you for your advice. I do have an external BD-R XL USB 3.0 drive that unless is connected to the USB 3.0 port to get as much power as it needs it cannot properly read the disc inside, let alone be able to burn any data!

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Sound like you could benefit from a USB 3 hub!

I very rarely have a need for extra USB 3 ports, but I do have a USB 3 hub stuffed away in a bin just in case! Every once in a while, it comes in handy, especially with some older machines or laptops.

My main PC is an unsupported 3rd generation Intel socket 1155 system, so no USB type-C ports. Back when I upgraded to that from my old Intel Pentum 4 system I needed as many legacy PCI ports as possible to connect my old PCI cards, so I selected this motherboard (ASUS P8H61) and I sacrificed the ability to have USB 3.0 or SATA 3 ports. So SATA 3 I don't mind at the moment since the SSD I am using is much faster compared to my old mechanical hard disk and any speed difference wouldn't be obvious, at least so it seems. For USB 3.0 I use a little USB 3.0 to PCIe card that gives me two USB 3.0 ports at the back. Due to lack of extra PCIe 1.0 ports I had to disconnect my IDE/SATA to PCIe card, so I don't have access to my old ATAPI DVD-RW drives, but I wasn't using them anyway. I had them to cover the otherwise empty 5.25" bays on my tower. I have lost the plastic covers.

hsehestedt said:

USB-C port on a Dell XPS 13 can supply 45W
USB-C port on a MacBook Pro can supply 87W

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What is the voltage then?

My new Oukitel phone has a wall wart that can put out ten volts.

kelper said:

What is the voltage then?

My new Oukitel phone has a wall wart that can put out ten volts.

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Prior to PD 3.1 (Power Delivery), with PD 3.0, the highest voltage was 20V with a maximum current of 5A. With PD 3.1 there are several higher voltages, all the way up to 48V. Because the current is still a maximum of 5A, you do not need any thicker cables, but the 48V can present a problem for a normal USB-C cable because you can get little arcs at that voltage which would wear down the connectors. To resolve that, on a USB 3.1 cable, some connections are longer than others so that they physically make contact first, eliminating the arc.

There are some other technical differences, but I've not heard much about them yet. Apparently there are some sort of provisions for bi-directional charging, but again, I really have not educated myself on that yet.

In any case, 48V x 5A = 240W. So, without increasing the maximum current at all, we now can get 240W of power delivery using devices and cables that are PD 3.1 capable.

NOTE: Not everything that is PD 3.1 can do 240W. Some max out at lower wattages such as 140W.

spapakons said:

Isn't 1500VA too much for a typical computer? Unless you are a gamer and you have 800W or larger PSU.

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My work station uses a 1kW PSU. This is not for gaming but I certainly have an extensive number of hard drives powered by this system, a power hungry Haswell based CPU, and 128 GB of high performance RAM to feed. The old NVIDIA 1070 doesn't draw that much power compared to what the newer GFX cards use but it all adds up. I don't even get 20 minutes shut down time when I have a power failure on this UPS but it's enough.

Isn't 1500VA too much for a typical computer? Unless you are a gamer and you have 800W or larger PSU.

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No, 1500VA is not too much, whatever is attached to that UPS will take just what it needs. It's not a charger that force-feeds power into a battery like in a car. A UPS consumes power and stores it in the battery akin to filling the gas tank on the car.

Berton said:

No, 1500VA is not too much, whatever is attached to that UPS will take just what it needs. It's not a charger that force-feeds power into a battery like in a car. A UPS consumes power and stores it in the battery akin to filling the gas tank on the car.

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^^^ That is an excellent analogy and I plan on using it to explain UPS to others. Running six of these things in my basement might seem like over kill but where I live we have frequent brown outs as we are rather isolated in a highly forested area. We also get many power spikes so it helps to keep clean power running to our devices. My work station is my main and some say running pure sine wave over the top, but I decided to err on the side of caution because sometimes even PSUs can fail.

Scannerman said:

I don't even get 20 minutes shut down time when I have a power failure on this UPS but it's enough.

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And that's the purpose of the UPS, maintain things long enough for an orderly shutdown to prevent data loss.