[bluedog]

I bought an external firewire enclosure (also with usb2.0). I was trying to put a 160GB drive in it and the drive simply doesn't fully spin up. Then I put a 20GB drive in and it loaded just fine.

I thought there wouldn't be a size limitation through the firewire interface. Is this a limitation of the chipset driving this? An Apple rep mentioned this as a solution to using the larger drives when the bios/builtin IDE controller doesn't support the larger sizes.

Or did I just get another lemon of an enclosure from CompUSA?

[seank]

I can't fully answer your question other than to say that I use a 160GB drive in my firewire enclosure with no problems.

-Sean

[boardsurfer]

I believe the size limitation is based on the chipset of the external case. Even so, I don't think it would cause your drive to not spin at all. Maybe a defective drive? Bad power supply in the case?

[bluedog]

You're right - it was likely a bad powersupply. I returned TWO of them with power supplies that died within minutes of plugging them in. It appears there may have been a bad connection shorting it out.

What a bother, I returned the THIRD one and got another manufacturers and it has been working just fine! Stay away from the CompUSA brand that has LED light effects.

Thanks for the posts.

[macvillage.net]

Originally posted by bluedog:
You're right - it was likely a bad powersupply. I returned TWO of them with power supplies that died within minutes of plugging them in. It appears there may have been a bad connection shorting it out.

What a bother, I returned the THIRD one and got another manufacturers and it has been working just fine! Stay away from the CompUSA brand that has LED light effects.

Thanks for the posts.

That's why I don't buy generic unless I know who really made it ;-)

Thanks for coming back and posting though. I was somewhat considering getting one of those enclosures for a backup HD. Haven't really researched.

Now I know not to bother even investigating CompUSA.

I'm curious... did you find anything online about them? Or did someone in the store say anything about problems with them? I'm curious if they are a bad batch, or just poor quality overall. Sometimes it's a bad batch in a great product.