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I have a 300 gig Maxtor One Touch II external USB II harddrive from about 2005 which has recently failed, and I have successfully put an older, smaller disk in there to make sure that it is the disk itself rather than the controller which has failed.

Rather than buy a completely new external drive, I am inclined to buy a bare disk and put it back in the enclosure.

My problem is, these days it's quite hard to find a 300 gig disk where I live - I'm much more likely to be able to find a terabyte and up - budget wise that's not a problem, but I don't know whether the enclosure's controller is up to the job.

Is there a limit on the size that a controller for a particular interface can handle? Is there a way to find out what it is?

Rich
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2 Answers2

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There are limits in terms of harddrives and controllers:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing
  2. http://www.pcworld.com/article/235088/everything_you_need_to_know_about_3TB_hard_drives.html

The first one appears at around 128GiB, so you should be safe as you had a 300GB Drive in there. The second one occurs at around 2.2TB, get a smaller disk and you should be safe.

Getting a 1TB Drive should be okay.

PS: I think you'll know about drive sizes (2.5", 3.5") and about the different interfaces...

Vanadis
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what is the supported size?

"Size" is an ambiguous term.
Do you mean the drive capacity or the form factor (i.e. 3.5" or 2.5")?

I don't know whether the enclosure's controller is up to the job.

The enclosure does not have a disk controller. The disk controller is embedded on the HDD. This has been true since the introduction of IDE hard drives.

The enclosure probably has a USB to PATA adapter.
HDD capacity is rather irrelevant to most USB-to-HDD adapters.
(The largest capacity PATA drive you can probably find/buy will be 500GB.)

The form factor, the drive interface (e.g. PATA, SATA I or SATA II or SATA 6Gbs) and power requirements (that the enclosure can provide) are the primary considerations in selecting a replacement HDD for any disk enclosure.

sawdust
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