Hiya,

Looking to add an external hard drive to my Windows 7 PC, and install Ubuntu on it to be able to dual boot without messing with the PC existing hard drive. The connection will be USB and since the machine is older, I will be relying on the backwards compatibility of USB 3.0 (to 2.0), which most of the drives are now. My question concerns power. I have seen both USB and AC powered and need to determine which I should get. Portability is not an issue...it will be rather permanent. Can a USB 2.0 port not only power the unit properly while transferring data, but also be able to run an OS like Ubuntu at the same time?