Comments on: Internal Drive & Drive Enclosure: Cheap Storage

By: Stumped

Stumped — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 07:07:58 +0000

I removed the jumper and… Success!

By: Stumped

Stumped — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 06:17:02 +0000

I just got a Western Digital 250G HD (new & unformatted) and a Nexxtech USB enclosure for my PowerBook G4. When I plug it in and fire up Disk Utitlity the new HD doesn’t show up at all. I even tried connecting to my PC laptop and same thing - nothing. Any ideas?

By: Drumattic

Drumattic — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 05:21:15 +0000

I replaced my maxtor 160 that died last week with a Diamondmax10-250.
It is only reading 128 of it and it mounts but will not partition or show the availabe space
Help please

By: luke

luke — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 11:54:23 +0000

I guess jumper settings should be added to this thread… whenever you put your own hard drive into an external enclosure with your mac the jumpers should be set to ‘master’ !

By: jared

jared — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 03:12:26 +0000

help! I built my own external drive using a Bytecc USB 2.0 enclosure and a 250 GB Maxtor Diamondmax drive that I bought from newegg.com… I have been completely unsuccessful in formatting and mounting the drive. I have used disk utility in Tiger to try partitioning, erasing, repairing, you name it and it hasn’t worked. When I go to “verify” the drive it says “the underlying task reports failure on exit,” what do I do? By all accounts from what people I’ve told me and what I’ve read this setup should work with my Mac (I have a 1.33 ghz 12 inch powerbook G4 running Tiger). Thanks for any help. Oh ya, I also se the jumper on the drive to the slave setting, clearly that’s what I want, right?

By: Nick Santilli

Nick Santilli — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:49:26 +0000

Ernest - haven’t run into that issue. Would have certainly mentioned it if I had. Glad you got around it.

Justin - my 2 lacie drives are as you mentioned. it is NICE. I have a power switch on my new enclosure, so I’ll just flip it when I want to stop hearing the fan.

It’s an ADS if you still care to know.

By: Justin Richard

Justin Richard — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:00:06 +0000

I own a cheap IO Mega external disk that I bought a while ago. The one thing that I hate about it is that it doesn’t “sleep” when my powerbook is asleep, or when it’s not being accessed. I love how the LaCie external drives are silent when not in use. I have to unplug my drive to stop it from spinning. I’d love to save a buck and use one of these inexpensive enclosures, but I’d like to know if the chip sets included with them park the drive and kill the enclosure fans when the disk is not in use? If the enclosure you own does this, what is the make and model?

By: Ernest Millan

Ernest Millan — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 13:56:14 +0000

Nick,

That sounds great. I recently replaced my old Linux server with a Mac mini, a 400gb Minimate, and a 200gb Western Digital with a $25 enclosure.

Though pricey, I do like the Minimate for the extra USB and Firewire ports and the design. Still, the “$25 enclosure” also does a fine job.

As far as the drive configuration is concerned, after formatting the drive to “Apple Journaled File System (extended)” I additionally had to *uncheck* the ‘Ignore ownership on this volume” option in the “Get Info” section for the drive to enable permissions. It took me quite a while to find this.

By: Twist

Twist — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 04:14:34 +0000

I would suggest subscribing to the feeds from SlickDeals. My stepdad just picked up a bare 200 gig drive for $50 after mail-in rebate thanks to that site.

Note for newbies, Journalled is excellent but if you need faster drive performance from your external (or internal drives for that matter) you should just use Mac OS X Extended. Journalled is more resistant to file corruption but you pay a little bit in the performance department.

If you need to connect this drive to a Windows computer you will either need to install an extension to allow Windows to mount Mac OS Extended disks or you will need to format the external drive as FAT16, FAT32, Unix File System, or some other format that Windows can handle out of the box. You can format as Unix File System using Disk Utility but I am not sure how you can format a HDD as FAT16 or FAT32 in Disk Utility (oddly it will let you format thumbdrives and other forms of removable media in FAT16 but not hard drives, it may limit it based on the connection method but I can’t test this because my external is Firewire only).

By: Nick Santilli

Nick Santilli — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 02:06:43 +0000

Maybe I meant internet…
or maybe I didn’t. You’ll never know.

By: Chris Holland

Chris Holland — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 01:01:29 +0000

mmm thanks dude, informative stuff. I’m a relative newbie when it comes to that kind of stuff. 6 months ago i did blow a good chunk of a cash on a 250GB LaCie HD. It’s purty though. I like purty. Going forward I’ll likely go your route.

You prolly wanna switch “internet hard drive” to “internal hard drive” in that story ;].