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tramahound · 01:28 PM

I have a 450mhz Cube which I've connected an OWC firewire 5.25" hdd enclosure to. Due to reasons beyond my comprehension the drive can only show up to 138gigs. Is there a way to have larger drives show all their capacity using a firewire enclosure, or is this a limitation of my cube's old IDE/66 controller? would I be able to get a multi-drive firewire enclosure and put say multiple 120gig drives in it and have them show up individually? I'm doubting this, but I'm curious. How can I get beyond this to add more capacity to my cube? or is this a dead horse? The Lacie Big drives would work for some reason wouldn't they? Oh, and if I can hook up a multi-drive enclosure to it, which one is good?
Thanks

ajprice · Oct 3, 2004, 02:20 PM

How big is your OWC drive supposed to be? Drives lose some space from the stated capacity because of formatting, my iPod 40 has 37 gig usable, my 120 gig internal hard drive has 114 gig usable. So if its under 10 gig short, its because the drive is formatted, which is how it should be. I've heard of certain older systems not being able to take big drives fitted as internal drives, but if it's a firewire drive, it should work to it's proper capacity, as far as I know.

tramahound · Oct 3, 2004, 02:54 PM

that's what I thought when I bought the drive...it's supposed to be a 160gig drive, but it shows as 138gig...

kupan787 · Oct 3, 2004, 05:52 PM

Originally posted by ajprice:
How big is your OWC drive supposed to be? Drives lose some space from the stated capacity because of formatting...

That is part of the reason. The other is because drive manufactures use powers of 10 rather than powers of 2 (SI units rather than computer units). So a drive manufactured as 40 GB is, converted to computer bytes, 37.25 GB.

I don't think the internal ata controller effects your firewire drive. My guess would be the firewire enclosure is old, and as such only has an ata/100 controler in it (137GB limit).

Spliffdaddy · Oct 3, 2004, 06:04 PM

137Gb is the limit imposed by the ATA/Firewire bridge chip in your external case. You need a more modern enclosure, in other words.

I understand that OSX will not mount FAT32 drives larger than 128GB. Some hard drives will ship with FAT32 formatting. This *might* be an issue to some folks, but you mentioned seeing 137GB - which is exactly the limit of older external firewire/USB cases.

Take all my opinions with a grain of salt. I don't own a Mac. But similar hard drive issues are found in peecee land.

tramahound · 07:08 PM

how does one make sure they are getting a "modern" enclosure? I got this with an oxford911 chip in it when that was the thing to look for. now what do I need to keep an eye out for? I found an enclosure here that lists a 2x 911 board. is that all i would need?
Then there's this one here that says it has the oxford 911 chipset, but can house two 400gig drives in it. Why/how?
thanks for the replies.

Spliffdaddy · Oct 3, 2004, 09:47 PM

somebody HAS to know the answer to those questions..this can't be uncommon.

BenN · Oct 4, 2004, 07:24 AM

This subject is covered at cubeowner.com.

There is a fix, as you will see.

Spliffdaddy · Oct 4, 2004, 10:48 AM

I see something...but I have no idea what it is.

Xaositect · Oct 4, 2004, 12:15 PM

Most likely an older firmware on the firewire bridge. Go to the manufacturer's website and download the firmware updater. If there isn't one, you can try a generic (some risk - may stop it from working if the board is too far from reference, take care and research if trying this). Also, OS 10.2.3 or 4 is the first OS 10 that supported drives over the limit you are seeing. Have your OS up to date (you probably do, it just wasn't mentioned earlier).

I can see 250GB FAT32 drives just fine from OS 10.3.5, but didn't use a drive of that size before so I don't know if previous OS revisions work, though 10.3.2 is supposed to.

And cubeowner.com is an excellent resource - bookmark it as long as you have the cube!

tramahound · Oct 5, 2004, 10:40 AM

that's almost not worth it. I have a single drive enclosure now that only shows 138gigs. I'd rather not take the chance of killing it with a firmware update especially since it's a no-name brand from OWC (who i've had bad customer support issues with in the past...). I just want to know why this is happening for sure before I go out and buy a $125+ multiple-bay enclosure only to find that it either doesn't show more than one drive or each drive only can show up to 138gigs. I'd rather not spend a bunch of money on a 200gig drive or more to put in it only to find out it won't all work. nobody seems to be able to give me a definitive answer on the subject which is even more disheartening. if other cube users have been able to see more than 138 i guess it would have to be my enclosure as others have said, but then what kind should I look for as the oxford 911 basis is not enough to look for as that's what I already have...
Thanks

Spliffdaddy · Oct 5, 2004, 12:46 PM

The 137GB limit Oxford firewire bridge was available through the end of 2002. Anything produced from 2003 - onward should support disks larger than 137GB.

Chip: OXFW911
Capacity: Up to 137 GB

Chip: OXFW911plus, OXFW912, OXFW922
Capacity: many terabytes

tramahound · Oct 5, 2004, 01:52 PM

you da man spliffdaddy!
that's the kind of info i was looking for. thanks for the help. I think I found one.

man what I wouldn't give for a nice fw800 port on my cube though!

Junkmein · Oct 5, 2004, 07:08 PM

The 137GB Hard drive limitation also applies to the firewire port. This is irregardless of internal or external use. When formatted it will show up as accessing the entire drive. However, when you move towards trying to store data on that section of the drive above 137GB it will give an error. The Cubeowner site has numerous articles on this. Luckily, the following company has released a software package that allows the Cube to utilize larger drives: http://eshop.macsales.com/Item_Apple...m=OWCSPEEDHCCD

Good Luck,

Junkmein

Spliffdaddy · 11:46 PM

I don't think the Firewire port is affected by that hard drive size limit. The software patch that has been mentioned will only work on the onboard ATA channels - and it's what I call a 'hack'...because it is code which resides on the hard disk and *must* be loaded in order for the machine to be fooled into seeing the whole drive. If you boot from a CD, the full hard drive capacity will not be reflected.

This 'hack' is freely available from any hard drive manufacturer (for the PC, generally) and is a great solution if there is no other solution to choose from.

Again, I seriously doubt that the Firewire port has a drive size limit. The onboard ATA controller in a computer is totally independent of the ATA controller (aka, 'bridge') in an external Firewire enclosure.

The size limit is dictated by the ATA controller that's being used - not the Firewire port itself.

I could be wrong. But I'd be surprised if I was.

tramahound's Cube already 'sees' capacities over 128GB - by virtue of it showing 137GB of the hard drive capacity.

If it was limited to 'seeing' 128GB, then I might be more inclined to believe there were issues with something besides the external Firewire enclosure's antiquated ATA bridge.

If you wanted to use an internal hard drive that was larger than 137GB in the Cube - your only choice would be to use the 'hack' software.

Spliffdaddy · Oct 6, 2004, 01:41 AM

Lots of answers here >

http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Ite...ech/ReadMe.pdf