Quote: Originally Posted by
JimmyFitz 
It will draw a little more than 1A when spinning the disk and reading. I don't know about surges, or what it draws when burning, only what average I have measured before while reading. A 5V@2A wall wart is what my adapter came with. My enclosure also has a firewire interface. No external power needed when using the firewire.
like you said, it going to be the current draw. I had a panasonic slim drive in external case, but it did come with a power brick. I want to say it was 2Amp at 5v which tells me the cd drive is going to draw 10watts of power! A usb port does not even have enough of current to spin the drive to play anything. Weird how he got it to work just on usb ports alone on other machines.