Firewire Enclosures and Support for 120+GB Drives?

smackthud asks: "I'm looking for an external firewire enclosure that works with a new 200GB Western Digital HD w/8mb cache. I tried putting the drive into my ADS pyro enclosure, however, the drive is seen by my G4 iMac as a 128GB drive, which is obviously incorrect. This is not a limitation of MacOSX 10.2 or the iMac, since the HFS+ filesystem supports 2TB+ file systems, and Firewire itself is device size agnostic. The enclosure simply isn't reporting the size of the drive properly. Some research has revealed that most enclosures that use the Oxford 911 bridge chipset do not support ATA100 drives larger than 120GB, while at least one supports up to160GB, but no more. My suspicion is that this is a limitation of the bridge controller's implementation of the ATA100 interface. I've heard that ATA100 had the optional ability to support 48bit address space rather than 32, which would mean that only those vendors who support the optional space would be able to address drives larger than 137GB. This may play a factor in Firewire chipsets which must bridge IDE to IEE1394. Existing products from both WD and Lacie prove that using this drive should be possible, and that any problems with large ATA100 drives have been solved by some vendors. Any helpful information or recommendations would be appreciated."

Re:Easy solution

[Toraz Chryx]

If you must troll, at least do it in an educated way.. the firewire disk enclosures would be limited the same way if you connected them to a PC...

OWC Mercury Elite FireWire Case Kit F/ ATA-6 Mech

[jtl]

Follow the OWC link given in the original article (the one that supposedly can handle up to 160gb but no larger -- where that idea came from isn't clear), then read the nice big prominent notice

This OWC Mercury Elite FireWire enclosure supports all brands of IDE/ATA 3.5" hard drive models up to 128GB. This enclosure also supports all Maxtor 3.5" IDE/ATA up to 250GB. If you plan to use an IBM or Western Digital Drive model that is larger than 128GBs, you will need our ATA-6 model Elite Enclosure available by clicking here.

and follow the final link -- http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=5350 &Item=OWCMEFWATA6

Re: OWC Mercury Elite FireWire Case Kit F/ ATA-6 M

[smackthud]

I just saw that my question finally got posted yesterday. Yes, you are correct, the link now points to a product that would've solved my problem, but back on December 06 2002 when I submitted this post, it did not.
As I suspected back when I posted, the post holiday roundup of new firewire enclosures and drives support full ATA-6. I've since returned the drive, and purchased a WD200gb firewire drive with enclosure for less than I paid for the original drive.
Thanks for your help!

The Wiebetech firewire bridges support 250gig...

[ewwhite]

....and ATA-6. It's surprsing that their products go unnoticed, but the lineup of firewire products [yahoo.com] from Wiebetech solutions [wiebetech.com] includes several products that will support large drives. Some even will support the large drives under bus-power.

I use a Wiebetech firewire super drive dock [wiebetech.com] connected to an 80gig Seagate desktop drive with my Powerbook G4. The Super Drive Dock is simply an anodized aluminum enclosure containing a firewire bridge that attaches to a bare drive. It supplies power to the disk via firewire bus power. Very tight design.

In addition, Wiebetech's bridge is home-grown and a bit faster than most on the market [barefeats.com].

Check it out.

Not quite homegrown

[Andy Dodd]

I believe that the Wiebetech devices are Oxford-based, just like almost all other Firewire enclosures.

But the OX911 chipset has an onboard ARM processor, so ATA-6 support can be added by changing the firmware. This is the main difference between Wiebetech's bridges and other OX911 bridges.

That said, from all I've heard, the Wiebetech bridges are excellent (albeit very expensive) - And pretty much one of the only choices if you want more than 137GB to be accessible.

I would not reccommend a bus-powered enclosure unless it also has support for an external adapter - Some HDs will overload even the best 1394 powered ports, and bus-powered drives won't work with machines that have 4-pin ports (like most laptops)

Re:Not quite homegrown

[ewwhite]

They are Oxford911, but the bus-powered bridge is proprietary. Still uses an Oxford 911 chip. But yeah, I was looking at from a Mac point of view. We all have 6-pin firewire ;)

ATA/100 tops out at 128GB

[bluestar]

As I understand it, all IDE specs up to ATA/100 are limited to 128GB (or 137(?) if 1GB = 1 billion bytes) by the number of address bits. When the first 160GB IDE drives (from Maxtor) came out they included an ATA/133 controller since all systems at the time only included ATA/100 or lower. ATA/133 increased the number of address bits (I don't know the new limit).

So a FireWire bridge would need to support ATA/133 devices for it to see beyond 128GB on the larger drives.

Hack one up yourself

[vasqzr]

This is Slashdot, isn't it?

Hack one up yourself ;)

I've done this...

[Spoing]

The case I'm using is unbranded with USB 1, 2, and 1394/firewire support. I've tested it under Linux (firewire & USB 1) and Windows (USB 1). Testing under Linux shows that the firewire connection allows for speeds similar to internal IDE drives. USB 1 support is as expected -- slow for both Linux and Windows. USB 2 support was not tested (no USB 2 host).

So far, my biggest complaint is that the 25mm fan (20mm blade) -- ARX CeraDyna FD0525 - A 1042A (DC 5v, 0.19A) -- is noisy and rattles. If anyone knows of a replacement or how to quiet it, let me know.

Stress testing for about a day shows that the drive remains cool, so the fan does it's job -- if not quietly.

Drive: Maxtor 120GB, 7200 RPM

Enclosure: no shock mounts for the drive

Connectors: 1 USB square B, 2 Firewire.

Two main chips with these markings;

1. ALI

   1. M5621 A1

      0210 TH05

      XHC79900000D

   (crab logo)

   1. RTL8801

   2. 22017S1

      212J TAIWAN

Re:I've done this...

[Large Green Mallard]

It's not exactly a crab logo, but I know what you mean.. "crab" logo + RTL = Realtek

> * The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is
> * probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible
> * exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master
> * DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance
> * gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.

For people using smaller drives.

[jelwell]

I own this same exact firewire housing. And I put a 120gig drive in it and Mac OS X wouldn't read it, but my Windows machine would. When I updated to Jaguar (10.2.2) suddenly Mac OS X read and wrote to the drive fine!

What might surprise you is that my titanium laptop with a 60 gig drive when booted into firewire mode (hold the t button down while booting and your mac will act like an external firewire drive) can't be read by a desktop Mac with OS 10.1. Update that desktop to 10.2.2 and suddenly my desktop recognizes the laptop as a firewire device!

I read the upgrade information, but I didn't see any documention about firewire fixes, but make sure your Mac has the newest updates and try again.

joe.