> 120 gig external drives

aquaticaquatic
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Can I plug a 160 Gig or 200 Gig FireWire hard drive into my iBook and see the whole drive? I am aware of ATA 66's 128 Gig limit, but what if the FireWire case used ATA 100 for the bridge? Also, can OS 9.2.2 see greater than 128 Gig drives? Can OS X? Also if I for some reason can't get an ATA 100 case or the MacOS won't support it, I can divy up the space on one drive into partitions when I re-format it, right? This would always I work, I assume?



Thanks for the answers! Those 320 GIG hard drives from Maxtor are insane. I'm thinking of getting one, or the 200 Gig Western Digital drive.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    ATA/100 has the same problems as ATA/66 in general. You need an ATA/133 bridge, basically. I'm pretty sure the ADS Pyro enclosures support the large drives. Most of the stuff at OWC seems to support the large drives too.



    In order to divy up the drive into recognizable partitions should there be any problems, you'd probably have to partition the drives in a computer that supports drive sizes larger than 137 GB. You'd need to do it in an ATA/133 equipped PC, and then transplant the drives...then reformat the partitions into HFS+.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    Argh! I was afraid of that Thanks for the informed response Eugene. I meant ATA 133 when I said ATA 100, by the way.



    So OWC and ADS use ATA 133? Since OWC is going out of business what does that mean? The ADS drives look extremely expensive compared to everything else.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    If you buy an enclosure with the drive already in it, then you'll have no problems. The Oxford 911 bridge that is used by virtually all Firewire enclosures supports large drives.
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