I have an external hard drive I bought. Model is SSK, Serial ATA, 2.5" external enclosure, mobile storage solution. It works ok on my Lenovo G550 that has Windows 7.
But when I connect it to my Thinkpad T22 with Windows XP SP2, it does nothing. Only thing that happens is the light comes on the external drive. I have even looked in windows explorer to see if the drive is shown and disk management and nothing is showing. I even tried add new hardware and it does not even pick it up or detect it in the list.

In my Lenovo G550 when I look at the properties of the external hard disk which shows up as G: drive it shows details for "wdc wd80 0bevs-08rst2 usb" but in the thinkpad, nothing

Is the drivers on the thinkpad outdated, or is the USB port on the thinkpad too slow.

Older laptops can usually work when using a Y-splitter and two USB ports, but your T22 only has one USB(1.1) port, which is not enough.
To get your HD going on the T22, you need an external power supply for that HD enclosure.

I have an old 80GB Hitachi HDD installed in a NexStar 3 external enclosure. When I connect it to the USB 1.1 rear port of my T21, it works fine. The T21 has WinXP Pro SP3. I don't even own an external power supply for the external enclosure. The only source of power for the external HDD enclosure is the USB 1.1 port itself.

Some hard disks draw more power than others. The WD HD from OP probably needs more than the Hitachi HD.

From what I've read the newer SATA drives have a higher power consumption than the older PATA drives. That may explain why you've had success using an older PATA Hitachi drive on the USB 1.1 port.

It all depends - I have a 2.5" pata enclosure, and with some drives it starts right up, other times it just sits and clicks, or it does nothing. You need the Y-adapter, and if you have that, just connect the power end (small cable) into another computer/usb power supply. That should give you sufficent power to run the drive.

Good luck.

To be more specific, my Hitachi drive is a 7200rpm Travelstar 7K100 PATA drive (HTS721080G9AT00). According to the Spec Sheet, the peak power consumption at startup is 5.5W. The read/write/seek average is 2.3W.

I have no idea what the power consumption is for the typical SATA drive.

On my remaining T23, its hit or miss as to what HDD enclosure works. For that matter, my T30 is somewhat finicky.

Ron

Thanks for the help guys, it was the USB port not powerful enough to run the external drive.
As I dont have a plug for the external hard drive, bought it on ebay. One of those Y lead USB adaptors came with it, I was wondering why it was that shape for. I plugged one of them into my Lenovo G550 and it worked (with the other 2 going from thinkpad to external drive).
I guess I would have to buy an adaptor plug for the hard drive or a 2.0 USB hub upgrade for the thinkpad.

If you get a powered hub you should be fine, but if you get a usb2 cardbus card, they *generally* need an external power source, so that may not solve all your problems (it would improve performance a lot though)

There are a lot of topics on here about various USB 2.0 pcmcia cards. I bought one years ago (Belkin) that has worked well and yes, it came with a power supply that I have to use with both my external HDD and my flash drives. Several users here have since found flush cards.

Here are some "aged" topics:
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=88631
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=63834