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Why are these hard drive enclosures advertised as having 160 GB maximum capacity?

http://amazon.co.uk/dp/B008MRBMPA

USB 2.0 interface (Compatible with USB 1.1), Up to 480 Mbps data transfer rates, 160GB capacity max

http://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0047YUUN2

brand new 2.5 inch External Hard Disk Drive Enclosure Case,Support all 2.5 inch (9.5mm) (max. capacity 160 GB) High IDE Notebook Nard Disk Drive, and It makes high-speed data transfers----supports USB 2.0 up to 480Mbit/sec, USB 1.1 up to 12Mbit/sec;

http://amazon.co.uk/dp/B00AVXMFIG

Maximum hard disk capacity: 160 GB

Gnubie
  • 2,943

2 Answers2

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The way most vendors work, they do not re-qualify out-of-production hardware for the latest specifications (unless some huge purchase contract relies on it, anyway), so as long as these old models stay in stock, their specs say the same. They may or may not support more modern, higher density hard drives, but vendors and the manufacturer won't guarantee it.

But why 160GB? It's not a common PC BIOS or CHS->LBA limitation, the closest would be 128GB. Back in 2007, 9.5mm drives went to 160GB while 200GB+ you had to buy a 12.5mm drive. That was just the state of the industry at that moment. You can see discussion in Mac forums like this: http://ask.metafilter.com/63097/Whats-the-max-size-harddrive-I-can-put-in-a-MacBook

kmarsh
  • 4,998
3

Modern enclosures (SATA) typically can handle drives up to 2 TB using 512 byte block-sizes and some enclosures support even larger disks with 4K block-sizes.
Older ones, for IDE-drives, usually have a 512 GB upper limit.
The ones you linked to are quite ancient IDE drive enclosures.

2 reasons come to mind for a 160 GB limit:

1) There is a USB to SATA (or IDE) converter-chip inside the enclosure that connects the harddrive itself to the USB. These sometimes have a maximum supported drive-size. (Although 160 GB is a bit strange. The limit is usually 512 GB (for IDE-drives) or 2 TB (for SATA-drives), because that is a natural boundary.)

2) They only tested up to a certain size (whatever was available at the time the chip was designed) and put that as limit on the packaging. It may work with bigger drives, but that is untested, so they put the tested limit on the box to prevent product-liability claims.

Tonny
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