portable HDD suggestion

Hi,

I want to buy a portable external USB hard disk drive (HDD) where I'd put my photos and videos and that I could connect to a standalone DVD/Divx player. This way, I'd watch my files on my TV and not only on my PC.

Easy to say, hard to find, be cause of lack of detailed parameters for bundled (already in-box) HDD.

The problem is that standalone players with a USB input never say how much current they send to the port. The USB spec is 500mA (at 5v). On PCs, you can always use a Y cable to get more juice and some ports also deliver up to 1000mA which is required for some disks spinning up at startup. But on standalone players you only have 1 port thus you have to provide a separate power to the HDD which is ugly and i really prefer a bus powered HDD.

My choice is for 2.5" HDDs at 5400 rpm because 7200 rpm (often on 3.5" disks) disks require even more juice and I'm not sure 4200 rpm disks (often on 1.8" disks) can support the bandwidth required for normal to high resolutions (say 640x480 or 1024x768, ...) even if they need less current.

More I'm unable to find any review/roundup focusing on current/power consumption not to mention the whole context of a standalone player reading videos from an external USB HDD where many other conditions and parameters exist like: size and partition type, filename format, etc.

Rather to buy and test, I'd like to know if anyone has any link on the subject, if anyone uses its disks in this way or what do you think of a survey in this forum.
Many thanks

P.S. I searched with no success in the web for a freeware giving the current and/or power consumption of a USB port on a PC very much like a utility called Speedfan giving temperatures, voltage and fan control for various PC components. Given that many many users experience USB powering problems, I'm surprised that no one has written anything on the issue!! maybe some sensors are lacking somewhere in motherboards?

Some external USB Hard Drive comes with extra power supply to support the current for HD. Some uses eSATA connection. while e from eSATA stands for external. By the time of my post you may have found one already.

I like the western digital passport 2.5" external drives, 160, 250, 320g capacities.