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."

Comments

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

The Wiebetech firewire bridges support 250gig...

[ewwhite]

....and ATA-6. It's surprsing that their products go unnoticed, but the lineup of firewire products from Wiebetech solutions 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 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.

Check it out.