External Enclosure Limits

[palladrj]

Dare I say I purchased an HP? My excuse, justification, rationale, is that I’m getting too old, and have little (ahem, no) patience to build. My analytical skills have deteriorated as well. Now that you know with whom you’re dealing, maybe you can help me solve my problem. The problem is not a work stopper, just a quest for mental closure.
Okay, here goes. I have two CompUSA and Metal Gear external enclosures. All enclosures have 5 ½ docking bays. This way I can swap drives easily. I thought that the CompUSA enclosures were limited to 127 until I installed an experimental Seagate 200gb. The Seagate was formatted on another PC with XP. The system recognized the 200gb. Wow, what an accomplishment. Now I can use all my recently purchased drives that exceed the 127 limit. Next, I tried a 300gb Maxtor formatted on the same PC as the 200gb. To my disappointment, the HP did not recognize the 300gb. When I tried to format the 300gb on the HP, it would only recognize the 127, not the 300.

Summary:
200gb Seagate formatted on PC with XP, Metal Gear enclosure and docking bay, was recognized with 200gb on HP with CompUSA enclosures with 5 ½ docking bays. Each drive used its individual drive tray.

300gb Maxtor formatted on PC with XP, Metal Gear enclosure and docking bay, was recognized with only 127gb on HP with CompUSA enclosures with 5 ½ docking bays. Each drive used its individual drive tray.

I am a hard drive junkie, more storage, and more storage!

If you’ve had the perseverance to read through, I would appreciate your comments.

Thanks
Palladrj

SYSTEM:
HPa1540n
AMD 64 X2 Dual Core
Windows XP Professional
16X Hi-Val Burner (replaced the HP 8X)
Added LITEON 16X DVD Reader
Added 160gb ATA Hard drive (came with 250gb SATA)

[glc]

Apparently the CompUSA enclosures must have a limitation, probably due to the age of the IDE to USB converter card in them. The newest enclosures will go to 500 gigs.

[palladrj]

Thanks glc. I guess that I didn'y explain myself very well. I used the same compUSA enclosure for both drives. The 200gb Seagate was recognized, but the 300gb Maxtor was not.

[pam123]

This actually came up over at newegg about 18 months ago.
One of the customer reviews actually had a list (compiled from all the other customer reviews) of what size hard drives by which manufacturers would or wouldn't be recognized by Bytecc enclosures and I remember several others for different makes of enclosures.
200 gb was, with a few exceptions, the point where trouble started.
Also, just to make life interesting, the fact that you can't get that 300 gb Matrox recognized doesn't mean that a 300 gb Western Digital won't work.
Newegg has made some changes in how it lists external enclosures since then.
As you can see from this page each enclosure now tells you what hard drive size it will support : http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=ENE&N=2010090092+50001641&Subcategory=92&description=&srchInDesc=&minPrice=&maxPrice=

Note the one at the top, where it reads Support up to 250GB/300GB HD Application
I think that was one of the drives that worked with some manufacturers drives but not others when the size went up too high.

[glc]

That simply tells me that the card in the housing is probably only good to 250gb.

[pam123]

That simply tells me that the card in the housing is probably only good to 250gb.

Most likely.
I think that's one of the older models as well.

[palladrj]

Well, that explains it. Yes, you are correct, the enclosure is relatively old in technological terms. Thanks to glc and PAM, the issue has been resolved.