External HDD Enclosure

[sleepyhead]

I bought myself one of these...

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=465786

I have HDDs from 120GB upto 750GB with data on and with varying partition sizes as well as being a mixture of IDE and SATA.

What I want to make sure is...when I plug a HDD into the enclosure, hook it up to laptop/PC, it is NOT going to want to format or "mysteriously" delete the partition...is it?

OS will be both XP Pro SP2 and Vista Home Basic/Premium (both 32bit).

Thanks.

[TAKTAK]

AFAIK it should be fine

as unless the caddy formats it itself (highly unlikely as it would cost alot more) then you would have to confirm anyway.......

but all the caddy does is convert the SATA connector into an eSATA.... so it's even using the same standard practically....

[jackvdbuk]

i have this and it only supports up to 400 gb HDD's

might want to check the akasa site...

[sleepyhead]

Well that would suck as it would rule out the 2 largest HDDs I have.

Really bizarre if it can't handle anything larger than 400GB HDDs. I may have to return it then to SCAN...but I've opened it already

Poo. The Akasa home page doesn't tell you it is limited to 400GB whereas I found one review so far that gives that information.

But according to their online manual for it here it states any capacity?

[shaithis]

It won't try to format the drive. The drive you connect in it will appear almost like any other hard drive does in your system.

As to capacity, it would be pretty bizarre for it not to work with just about any capacity drive.....although I only have a 320GB drive in mine so cannot confirm I'm afraid.

EDIT: Scans site also states "Supports any 3.5" IDE PATA or SATA I and SATA II drives"

[jackvdbuk]

so i was correct sleepy? might aswell try and see if it works sleepy if youve already opened it.

[Mithrandir]

I bought the exact same drive from the Today only offer a couple of days ago. I took delivery of it a couple of hours ago so not been able to try it out, but will see if I can get a 500gb drive working.

[sleepyhead]

Just tried my 200GB PATA drive.

It worked for 10 minutes then *boom*....it went dead.

Took it apart and the back plate had come loose (one screw dropped out) which dislodged the power connector.

A bit later after some careful re-assembly it all sits nicely again. I turned it on and nothing...jiggled stuff around and *woosh* it came back alive. It still is alive after 2 hours so maybe it'll keep working. Who knows.

Build quality on mine is pap.

[peterb]

i have this and it only supports up to 400 gb HDD's

might want to check the akasa site...

I'm surprised, however that will only apply to the USB interface, if you are using a SATA drive and the eSATA interface, it is effectively pass through, and there should be no problems accessing any size drive that the mobo supports.

Edit:

(Just had a look at the Akasa web site - no mention of any limitations of drive size for SATA or PATA)

[Mithrandir]

I just tried my enclosure with an F1 500gb HDD. It detected the device and HDD but sadly it does not show up as a drive. I checked in Disk Management and you can see a drive but have no access to options to format, etc.

This was a sata drive through USB. I don't have esata on my mobo so can't test peterb's suggestion.

A real shame really as up to 1tb support would have been fantastic for the future (even though I have no 1tb HDD yet )