dmm108
01-27-2007, 11:13 PM
This is my first visit to these forums, and I could use some help.
I needed to replace the drive in a 200GB Maxtor external case. Maxtor assured me that I could use any size 3.5 drive I could buy. I bought two drives to try, a Western Digital 250GB drive and a Seagate 7200.9 300GB drive, both parallel ATA drives.
I installed the WD drive first. Partition Magic showed the correct capacity, I formatted a small partition FAT32 and ran a few write tests. I then installed the Seagate. Partition Magic only saw about the 137GB limit that you would expect with pre-48 bit systems. I am running XP with Service pack 2, I obviously can address more than 137GB, since the WD drive showed its full capacity of 250GB (I know it's less but that is another thread, for the sake of this discussion let's ignore that), and I had been using the Maxtor 200GB drive happily until I destroyed it. The drive connects to my laptop through USB 2.0. I tried the jumper both on cable select and master with the same results.
I'm completely stumped, i've been able to find no similar experiences in searching the web, so I'm open to suggestions. Seagate's disc wizard which came with the drive also only showed 137GB of capacity.
Thanks for any help you might be able to provide.
dmm108
(BTW, the Seagate was significantly faster, writing 1.5GB worth of files in 1 min 5 seconds as compared to 1 min 50 seconds for the Western Digital. Turning off the on-drive cache increased the time 15 seconds for the WD and about 30 seconds for the Seagate. The seagate had 16M compared to 8M of cache for the WD. The Seagate was also significantly hotter. While both drives were manufactured recently, this particular WD drive first appeared in 2003. )
I needed to replace the drive in a 200GB Maxtor external case. Maxtor assured me that I could use any size 3.5 drive I could buy. I bought two drives to try, a Western Digital 250GB drive and a Seagate 7200.9 300GB drive, both parallel ATA drives.
I installed the WD drive first. Partition Magic showed the correct capacity, I formatted a small partition FAT32 and ran a few write tests. I then installed the Seagate. Partition Magic only saw about the 137GB limit that you would expect with pre-48 bit systems. I am running XP with Service pack 2, I obviously can address more than 137GB, since the WD drive showed its full capacity of 250GB (I know it's less but that is another thread, for the sake of this discussion let's ignore that), and I had been using the Maxtor 200GB drive happily until I destroyed it. The drive connects to my laptop through USB 2.0. I tried the jumper both on cable select and master with the same results.
I'm completely stumped, i've been able to find no similar experiences in searching the web, so I'm open to suggestions. Seagate's disc wizard which came with the drive also only showed 137GB of capacity.
Thanks for any help you might be able to provide.
dmm108
(BTW, the Seagate was significantly faster, writing 1.5GB worth of files in 1 min 5 seconds as compared to 1 min 50 seconds for the Western Digital. Turning off the on-drive cache increased the time 15 seconds for the WD and about 30 seconds for the Seagate. The seagate had 16M compared to 8M of cache for the WD. The Seagate was also significantly hotter. While both drives were manufactured recently, this particular WD drive first appeared in 2003. )