Oxford 911 drive enclosure limited to IBM drives

CNET staff

Sept. 1, 2009 11:36 p.m. PT

Phil Sandiford writes: "I purchased the OWC 3.5 Oxford 911 FireWire enclosure 5 weeks ago and loaded my Maxtor 45 GB mechanism into it. Immediately the drive showed up on my desktop and diagnostics checked out fine. When I used it as my system back-up all the files verified. Shortly thereafter, the drive stopped working. I was told by OWC tech support that the enclosure's power supply is known to work only with IBM mechanisms because it only supplies 1.25 amps. They also cautioned against using Western Digital."

Update: Subsequent to our original post above, we received this comment from FireWire Depot tech support: "It sounds like the manufacturer made a decision to use a low-power power supply, and when a user attempts to use a Maxtor or Western Digital drive (which require more power), the power supply does not have enough juice to spin up the drive. The drive is fine otherwise. The manufacturer needs to replace the power supply they are using with a 2A or 2.5A power supply - that will fix all the problems.

We have not had any issues raised from anyone who purchased these units from us. It also seems unlikely that if the power supply only works with IBM drives, then why did the Maxtor drive work just fine the first time? Sounds like something else is going on there."

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