18 Aug
2004
18 Aug
'04
6:47 a.m.
Hi,
I'm looking into buying an external hard drive enclosure with
USB2 & firewire ports, for fitting with an IDE or SATA 3.5" drive.
I've been doing some research, but I've nowhere found information
on the maximum capacity these things support - I imagine the
IDE-to-USB-or-Firewire bridge would be subject to the same sort
of limitations we've seen over the years with the PC BIOS.
Can anyone point me to more info?
TIA, Eric
18 Aug
18 Aug
2:41 p.m.
For usb you can find the specs for the mass storage class here:
http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs
I hope you like to read standards :-)
They certainly have reserved enough bits in the protocol to allow for
huge LBA-numbers. Maybe the commands are even transported transparently,
so the adressable size would only depend on the driver software.
Don't know much about it though, just my 5 cents.
Eric Dondelinger wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking into buying an external hard drive enclosure with
USB2 & firewire ports, for fitting with an IDE or SATA 3.5" drive.
I've been doing some research, but I've nowhere found information
on the maximum capacity these things support - I imagine the
IDE-to-USB-or-Firewire bridge would be subject to the same sort
of limitations we've seen over the years with the PC BIOS.
Can anyone point me to more info?
TIA, Eric
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19 Aug
19 Aug
6:36 a.m.
Hi Jay,
thanks for your reply!
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Jay Christnach wrote:
For usb you can find the specs for the mass storage
class here:
http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs
I hope you like to read standards :-)
I had hoped for a relatively short answer, but if it's
got to be... ;-)
They certainly have reserved enough bits in the
protocol to allow for
huge LBA-numbers. Maybe the commands are even transported transparently,
so the adressable size would only depend on the driver software.
Well, some people here at the office meanwhile told me
that they think (!= know) that the protocol is translated
transparently, i.e. the bridge chip doesn't even need to
know about disk size etc., so no trouble there apparently.
I guess I'll just have to order things in a shop where, just
in case, I can exchange the disk or enclosure.
While I'm at it - what's the current status regarding hard
disks (large IDE drives, i.e. >> 120GB) - which are ok, which
are not? The criteria are mainly reliability, speed isn't as
important for this application.
Over the years, it seems about everybody had bad series
of drives:
- Seagate "sie geht oder sie geht nicht"
- Quantum - the fireballs of 2-3GB did get broken easily
- IBM can't remember the exact series that was bad
- ...
How about Maxtor, Samsung, Western Digital, etc. etc.?
i.e. I'm perfectly willing to buy Seagate again if their
current series are ok.
Greetings & TIA, Eric
7393
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2 comments
2 participants
participants (2)
-
Eric Dondelinger -
Jay Christnach