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General discussion

500gb hd=465gb in ext usb2 enclosure & 449gb in fw400 enc?

Oct 9, 2007 4:53PM PDT

bought a 500gb maxtor usb2 external enclosure. plugged it in and reformatted the nt volume to mac os extended with a single 465gb volume. smooth as silk... cracked open the maxtor enclosure (TRICKY) and removed the hd to put it into my quad bay firewire enclosure (got the usb box on sale for the same price as just a bare drive...). when i turned on the fw enclosure, mac os gives me the unreadable volume error...disk utility reports that the drive is __unformatted__ and is __449__gb!?!?? this number is incorrect! binary mathmatics says it should be 4-6-5! of course, once plugged back into the usb box, the drive is happy to be 465gb again. disk utility reports it is 4-6-5gb with no directory problems...

i'm guessing that somehow the firewire chips need a driver update? it's a cooldrives enclosure with oxford 911 chips. the production date of the fw enc is may 16, 2005. weren't there already 500gb ide hds on the market then? seriously lame.

any pointers on how/where/why there is a fix would be much appreciated. 16 gigs IS 16 gigs and i don't trust using the hd in the intended configuration without knowing what the story is....

Discussion is locked

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Not sure what the story is here, but
Oct 9, 2007 9:50PM PDT

some firewire interfaces do not handle large drives well.

I have two that will not go past 137GB, no matter what the size of the drive is, and another that goes to 500GB. (It says)

I'm not sure what the differences are between the Oxford 911 and the Oxford 911+ chip. I'm going to check that out today.

P

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Binary math and more.
Oct 9, 2007 11:03PM PDT

Some of that space may be used for partition tables and more. Each OS differs and some will show the space you will get for your files while others will show the drive space. This area has caused much confusion but in this case your are very close.

Since you are recycling parts there's no support for this.

Bob