And I Thought The Fun Was Over – My Maxtor Madness Part 2
Posted on 12 April 2007, at 7:33 pm, by Mitchell Oke
Yesterday I was picking up the parts for a PC I was building for a friend, and while I was at the store I picked up a new 250GB Samsung HDD to slip in my now empty Maxtor case. It looks just like any other external 3.5″ enclosure inside so no problems right? Well I should have guessed the Maxtor pain would not end with just a dead drive and data loss.
Installing the drive should have been simple enough. Just plug in the power and IDE cable, screw it in and away you go! Not so. Upon connecting the drive to my MacBook Pro, it asked me to initialize it. So I clicked initialize and the Disk Utility window appear. Format went fine, and now I have a clean 128GB drive….wait what?
The computer would only recognize the HDD as 128GB for some reason. I thought it may have just needed to be repartitioned to create a full 250GB (or 230GB or whatever in “real” numbers) but the physical drive was only showing a capacity of 128GB. So I unplugged it from my MBP and connected it to my desktop. No dice. Computer Management still shows a total size of 128GB. Playing with the jumpers didn’t help, and connecting it using an IDE to USB I have didn’t work either.
Trusty Google to the rescue with an answer that just seems baffling: Maxtor enclosures cripple other manufacturers drives.
That’s right, from what I have read online this is a very common problem, and that there is a good chance putting a Samsung/Seagate/Whatever drive into a Maxtor enclosure will alter the drives maximum size to 128GB. One person I found was lucky with a Western Digital drive (although I wouldn’t buy one of those either) and it didn’t “clip” his drive as he called it, but another poster with a WD drive did have it happen.
I have yet to try any of the possible solutions mentioned on these threads other than swapping from Firewire to USB, and Mac to PC, but one thing is for sure, I won’t be putting another drive in this case. It’s probably headed for the garbage bin.
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Mvix Wireless Hi-Definition Media Player (MX-760HD) - Page 17 - AVS Forum Says:
March 18th, 2008 at 5:17 am[...] an external USB/firewire case, and it was a bitch to get it to reformat back to its full capacity. http://www.geardiary.com/2007/.....ss-part-2/ http://forums.macosxhints.com/.....68166.html One of the posts said that they used MHDD [...]
April 12th, 2007 at 7:55 pm
You might try putting the drive in a desktop using an IDE cable and performing a low-level format.
April 12th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
I thought IDE in general was restricted to 128GB, but apparently that’s only earlier versions of the interface..
Wikipedia says that “This problem is also found in older external FireWire disk enclosures, which limit the usable size of a disk to 128 GB.”
So it may just be your enclosure is “old” or isn’t being recognised properly.
April 12th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
That also came to my mind. Older revisions of IDE only recognized 128GB. Did your enclosure originally come with a drive installed? It is possible Maxtor used an older rev of IDE in order to cut costs, thinking nobody would take out their drive to insert another one?
That still doesn’t explain it working fine with Maxtor-branded drives, though…
April 12th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
The case originially came with a 160GB drive which was recognized just fine (up until it died of course
). I also have another identical unit which came with a 200GB drive.
Therefore I’d say the IDE interface on them is ok. The unit was bought as a sealed item, not separate parts.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Hmmmmm, seems like a “mythbuster” like experiment to do, to comfirm it… find out what really causes it and how to fix and restore the hard drive.
Only bad, I dont have any working Maxtor external boxes to test with.
Mitchell, if you’re going to dump the Maxtor box, PCB and P/S, maybe you can send it to me for experimenting?
April 13th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Another reason to avoid Maxtor.
fwiw, I’ve had -zero- issues with WD drives. Also, my WD 160GB portable external drive is faster than my no-name enclosure, Seagate drive 500GB external drive.
April 15th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I had a 300gb Maxtor One Touch II (usb/firewire) hard drive, I got it when they first came out. It was pretty cool, looked great but was a bit slow (23mb/s).
I took it apart the a while ago because it was acting up.. turns out the firewire/usb board was freaking out, but the hard drive worked fine plugged in my computer directly.
But yeah, I’m thinking that because Maxtors were the very first drives that supported ATA133, they’ve engineered their products to work correctly with only ATA133 drives and not ATA100 like most other Seagates & Western Digitals. Maybe that’s why you’re only seeing 128gb with your Samsung.