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badtz · Jul 15, 2005, 06:54 PM

Are there any firewire chipsets that support 500GB hard drives?

I'm about to buy a 500gb hard drive, but since I have a laptop, I'll have to stick it in a firewire enclosure.

The Oxford911 chipset only supports up to about 300gb I believe.

any help would be great

[preferably for Serial ATA drives]

tooki · Jul 16, 2005, 01:11 PM

Any SATA enclosure will support all drive sizes.

For regular ATA, just look for a case with large drive support ("48 bit LBA"). That boundary is at 137GB. It either does or doesn't support drives bigger than that. (Oxford 911 can support 48 bit LBA -- it depends on the bridge board design.)

tooki

MaxPower2k3 · Jul 16, 2005, 02:39 PM

I wish Firewire enclosures for SATA drives were more readily available. There are a couple, but they're really expensive ($100+) and, for the most part, pretty ugly.

ghporter · Jul 16, 2005, 03:35 PM

SATA is a little too new for the support chips to be as available as the "accessory" market likes. They tend to wait until the support chips are fairly inexpensive and plentiful before they start building the support into "affordable" enclosures. Take a look at how long it was between when ATA-133 drives werer widely available and when ATA-133-compliant enclosures were avaiable for under $200. That was a LONG time. Plus the price of drives themselves has come down quite a bit already, though there's still a premium-manufacturer and vendor dependent, of course. I think that SATA enclosures will start being in the "affordable" category when the SATA drive premium gets very small and a lot more computers support them.

Not sage wisdom, just restating the historically obvious...

MaxPower2k3 · Jul 16, 2005, 09:30 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

I think that SATA enclosures will start being in the "affordable" category when the SATA drive premium gets very small and a lot more computers support them

The former has already happened. Look at a list of drives of a particular size on newegg.com... they're all within $5 of each other. There'll be a few ATA, then a few SATA, then some more ATA drives... there's really no price difference between EIDE and SATA. And even cheapo Dell desktops use SATA drives already. Not sure about other brands like HP.

badtz · Jul 17, 2005, 02:32 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

Any SATA enclosure will support all drive sizes.

For regular ATA, just look for a case with large drive support ("48 bit LBA"). That boundary is at 137GB. It either does or doesn't support drives bigger than that. (Oxford 911 can support 48 bit LBA -- it depends on the bridge board design.)

tooki

tooki,

in the case of my current firewire enclosure, it states that the maximum capacity for this drive is 200gb [I have a 200gb in it] ..... does that mean that that maximum is hindered because of the manufacturer and not the chipset [since it supports 48bit LBA since it's over 137GB]?

If that's the reason, from a business standpoint, why would a manufacturer do that?

curious.

Thanks for hte great info!

tooki · Jul 17, 2005, 10:51 PM

That almost sounds like an artificial limitation.

But I have another theory: it supports >200GB drives, but was released when 200GB was the biggest. Since it had not been tested with bigger drives, they aren't advertising it as supporting anything bigger.

tooki

tooki · Jul 17, 2005, 10:55 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Take a look at how long it was between when ATA-133 drives werer widely available and when ATA-133-compliant enclosures were avaiable for under $200. That was a LONG time.

That's because of two reasons:

1) No single drive ever released can saturate ATA/100. There is zero benefit from ATA/133, besides marketing.

2) ATA/133 is not an official standard. ATA/100 is the last ratified parallel ATA standard. All subsequent ATA stadards from the ATA standards body are serial, beginning with SATA.

tooki

ghporter · Jul 18, 2005, 10:49 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

That's because of two reasons:

1) No single drive ever released can saturate ATA/100. There is zero benefit from ATA/133, besides marketing.

2) ATA/133 is not an official standard. ATA/100 is the last ratified parallel ATA standard. All subsequent ATA stadards from the ATA standards body are serial, beginning with SATA.

tooki

Very true on both points, but there is a practical use for a 133-capable drive when burst traffic can help performance. Besides, as it IS all marketing, wouldn't you expect the marketing drones to latch onto the "faster is better" handle and push enclosures that could take advantage of 133-capable drives? I would.

I've also thought of another reason these things were slow to come out: slow acceptance of the concept that an external drive could be as simple as an interface card and a standard drive. A lot of folks were leery of these things as manufactured products for a long time, and so they didn't "fly off the shelves."

I do expect the SATA enclosures to come down in price much quicker than the ATA ones did, both because SATA IS a standard and because of the fairly recent history with ATA enclosures.

tooki · Jul 18, 2005, 01:01 PM

Originally Posted by ghporter

I've also thought of another reason these things were slow to come out: slow acceptance of the concept that an external drive could be as simple as an interface card and a standard drive. A lot of folks were leery of these things as manufactured products for a long time, and so they didn't "fly off the shelves."

Maybe in the PC world. External drives have been constant companions of Macs for two decades. We are quite used to external drives being simple and reliable.

tooki

ghporter · Jul 18, 2005, 06:58 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

Maybe in the PC world. External drives have been constant companions of Macs for two decades. We are quite used to external drives being simple and reliable.

tooki

Unfortunately the "tinker" market doesn't pay (enough) attention to Mac users. I think that's the big thing here. They look at the larger (and sometimes more "tend following") Windows user market because that's where the $$ are. Besides, some Windows users are superstitious to say the least, and aren't likely to go for some new product until they've seen it featured in Computer Shopper or PC World.

My dream in this area would be an ethernet external enclosure that I could mount a drive in and build my own Network Attached Storage-all cool and quiet.