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Hornet · Mar 5, 2004, 08:43 PM

Recently I purchased a Western Digital 160GB JB model (8mb cache) HDD, to put into a firewire enclosure. After looking around for a bit, I eventually picked up a firewire400+usb2 enclosure by Connectland (local aussie brand I think). Assembly was drop dead easy... everything went smoothly until I connected it to my mac (1ghz Ti)..

Upon first powering it up, it requested to be initialised, so Disk Utility (panther 10.3.2) opens up. In the list of devices and statistics down the bottom, I see 149.1GB Oxford Semiconductor Ltd, total write capacity 149.1 GB (160,041,885,696 Bytes) (makes sense as its a 160GB drive), connection bus Firewire, Write status read/write, Connection type external, and some connection ID. All is well so far.

Until I go erase, and try to make a 149GB partition (the entire drive). Disk utility just kept hanging at the first step (partitioning I think it was). The disk would just sit there doing nothing, and disk utility would sit there doing nothing, locked for 45mins on 'partitioning' or whatever it said. Thinking this was a bit odd, I went to partition, and made a 127GB partition and the rest free space (thinking it may be the whole ata5 137GB drive issue). Everything worked fine then.

So what I effectively see now in disk utility, is 149.1GB Oxford Semiconductor Ltd as the Device, with the partition being a 126.9GB partition formatted in Mac os extended (journaled).

So what is going on? Why can I see that the IDE to firewire bridge (some Oxford chip) can see that there is >128GB capacity, but I can't format anymore than about 128GB? I would have thought if it was the >128/137 ata issue the bridge chip wouldn't be reporting being attached to a hard drive of greater than that...

To make matters more interesting, a friend bought the identical case, but a 200GB hdd. Under XP, he can format it in NTFS (I think it is) using the entire drive capacity. Is it a disk utility thing? My powerbook only has ata4 or whatever so is that a problem, even though it's on an external bus?

Really wondering where the limitation is here.. and hoping I can claim 20 or so GB of disk space

Thanks in advance for any responses

edit: NTFS not FAT32, I think

reader50 · Mar 5, 2004, 11:28 PM

Check the website for your FireWire box, see if there is a firmware update available.

If Disk Utility can see the entire drive, then it's not limited to 128/137 GB. My first guess is that your friend got the same model with a later firmware version.

Hornet · 01:10 AM

The firmware it had was the oxford 3.5 (911 I think), so I applied the 3.8 (whatever the latest one was) and had no difference in the results. But I shall try his enclosure to see if there is a difference. Maybe mine has a problem with it.. but in any case I can check versions of the firmware then.

edit: their website mentions ATA66/100/133 support, so I presume the bridge chip isn't limited to ATA5 with the 128/137 issue... just another finding

Hornet · Mar 7, 2004, 12:50 AM

Update: I believe the chipset used is an Oxford 911 (for 1394a FW400) and another chipset for USB2.0. Connecting the drive via USB gives very different information about the controller chip etc, another company other than Oxford. So it's not the 912 (FW800) or 922 (FW800+USB2). Oxford's updater program recognised it as a 911, and as I said previously I applied the update to the latest firmware (3.8), no changes, still hangs at the same point.

Interestingly - I connected the drive via USB (2.0 on the drive, 1.1 on my powerbook) and tried formatting it that way. It had the same >128GB problem. Now the controller chip is a combo of the oxford chip and another, yet both have the same problem. I'm beginning to think perhaps it's not a HDD/enclosure issue? I might try formatting the hdd when in the enclosure connected to one of the G5's at uni, that will change a few of the variables in the equation.

Still awaiting an email back from connectland.

SSharon · Mar 7, 2004, 06:56 PM

I bought the same hard drive as you 3 months ago and put it in a coolmax firewire/ usb2 case and formatted it on a friends old ibook running OS 9. You might try plugging it into an older mac like I did, it took maybe 10 seconds to initialise the disk on that 300mhz ibook and my MDD (panther) works fine with it in both firewire and usb 2 (I put in a usb 2 pci card, note firewire is faster). good luck.