BertL
Active Member
Power draw is part of the USB spec. Tesla does document the ports as being USB 2.0. I'm not a guru in such things, but just scanned through some USB spec info... While things like keyboards and joysticks are two specific device classes (Human and Physical Interface Devices) within the USB Spec itself, and it looks like it's relativity easy to say exclude support for them as a group like Tesla did earlier, there is just one device class (Mass Storage) that is for all USB flash drives, camera media cards, and external drives combined. ...but from a programming perspective, it appears there are then different protocols that have to be enabled to support all of the different types of mass storage devices the hardware standard can accept. Get the difference?I'm curious what constitutes a 'hard drive'. My understanding is that a USB enclosure can parent issue simply "USB mass storage" just like a thumb drive. I'm wondering if power draw has anything to do with it? A 2TB would be a spindle drive as opposed to an SSD. And as of .19, my SSD in USB 3.0 enclosure is still working.
If I were to guess, what Tesla did was implement what was simple (USB Flash Drives), or again, what they thought would serve the purpose without really considering everything real owners are using today. I bet Tesla simply didn't go to the trouble of adding the additional software protocols needed to support external drives in the 8.0 rewrite, perhaps in part because of other somewhat deprecated parts of today's OS. Perhaps that will come in with the underlying OS upgrade Elon referenced would be happening in December -- it's any of our guess. For those using USB HDD, we can only hope. OTOH, I could be a skeptic and suggest HDD will never be supported again... IIRC, one of my former vehicles (just can't remember which one) specifically called out HDD not being supported in their Owners manual. I didn't think anything of that at the time, but now I guess maybe I have an inkling as to one reason why that could have been back in the day.