Large hard drives not recognizing full capacity in some enclosures (#3)
Large hard drives not recognizing full capacity in some enclosures (#3)
We previously reported on an issue where using certain enclosures for large hard drive can result in some of the drive's capacity not been seen.
Some cases use older FireWire chipsets don't support the higher capacity drives and will only recognize the first 128 GB (and only allow Disk Utility to format the drive to 128 GB). Typically getting a newer case with current Firewire chipsets will let you use Disk Utility to format the drive to the actual capacity.
However, we've received reports from some users indicating that cases which previously housed large capacity drives are limited to 128 GB when a different drive is placed inside -- a possible result of conflicting FireWire chipsets.
MacFixIt reader Paul Nedrow writes:
"Just this week I installed a new Seagate 250Gb in an old Maxtor firewire enclosure. Since the original drive was a 250Gb, I expected no problem. I ended up with the same results as Sherman Heinig: a 128Gb drive on any platform (Mac, Win, Linux). I haven't yet found the proper utility to restore the drive to 250Gb capacity."
Scott Hander adds:
"I had a LaCie 80GB Firewire drive that I put a 200GB drive in, however the drive would only format to 128GB just like your initial report. I thought that it was just something that LaCie intentionally made that way so that you would have to actually buy a new enclosure and drive to upgrade capacity. I would have thought the Firewire interface would see whatever capacity the drive was."
We previously noted that the (PC-DOS) software FeatureTool allows you to change the recognized capacity for drives from some manufacturers, though we've yet to find a counterpart utility for Mac OS X.
Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.
Previous coverage:
Resources