Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

500GB & OWC On-The-Go USB Enclosure

ZMacintosh

ZMacintosh

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 13, 2008
1,506
785
So i recently picked up a 500GB WD Scorpio Blue 16mb Cache 5400RPM & this http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/USB2/OWC_Express

It says it supports upto 640GB 7200RPM drives that are typical 9.5 size drives.
however everytime i plug in the enlcosure with drive it never shows up in disk utility or finder.
and ifi restart with it plugged in it freezes and hang at the grey screen until i unplug it.

The funny thing is; the OWC enclosure works with my MBP's 250GB drive and 320GB western digital.
the 500GB works internally in my MBP and in my OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad interface.

so they both work but apparently theres a conflict with both devices together....OWC even sells the 500GB Scorpio Blue on their site in combination with this enclosure.
with the 500GB & OWC enclosure it shows the enclosure in About This Mac > USB > Express USB2 devices


any ideas on why this particular combination does not work? i know WD has 500GB passport drives.
i tried another OWC enclosure and another generic enclosure same results.
i ran diagnostics on the drive and there are no corruption or bad fragments whatsoever.

((i tried contacting OWC but they have yet to reply all week..))

thanks
 
I have the USB/FW800 OWC on-the-go enclosure with a WD Scorpio Blue 500GB drive inside. I have no problems with the enclosure or drive. I will ask a stupid question ... did you independently verify the Scorpio drive? I own 4 of the scorpio blue 500 GB drives and I have had to have one replaced under warranty. At this point, I have an older Dell PC with an SATA bus and I plug the new drives in that machine and run the WD diagnostics on it before I use it with a Mac. If it passes the diagnostics clean, then I move it to a Mac, format and use it. I lost a bunch of work when the drive flamed out. I have these drives in both an early 2008 17" MBP and a 2007 Mac Mini. I also have the drives in an OWC enclosure and a Rosewill one. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to periodically back up each system to one of external drives.
 
i do the same, i hooke them up to a Windows XP Pro system, run the WD Diagnostics.

Right now i installed Snow Leopard on it running off the OWC drive. (its booted into it now)

the funny thing is, the drive works perfectly fine in every other enclosure and internally in the MBP's
the OWC drive seems to work with all the drives i put in there WD and various brands 250's 320's.

the drive checks out, i did a TechTool test on it as well. no issues form any of the diagnostic utilities
 
Life is full of mystery ... based on the number of "refurb" On-The-Go enclosures I see on the OWC e-mail I get periodically, I would be inclined to think that the OWC enclosure is wacky.

I will say that I bought the Rosewill enclosure because I was not thrilled with the OWC enclosure being mostly plastic with only a bottom heatsink. The Rosewill enclosure is all metal. The whole enclosure gets hot when I pound the drive ... I think that is way better for the drive than the OWC one where there is limited heat transfer. One note on the Rosewill, the packaging stated that it was good up to 320GB drives. The 500GB drive works fine in it. The Rosewill has a newer Oxford chipset, but in my performance testing, it was maybe a tad slower than the OWC.

Best of luck to you ...
 
gwerhart0800 said:
Life is full of mystery ... based on the number of "refurb" On-The-Go enclosures I see on the OWC e-mail I get periodically, I would be inclined to think that the OWC enclosure is wacky.

I will say that I bought the Rosewill enclosure because I was not thrilled with the OWC enclosure being mostly plastic with only a bottom heatsink. The Rosewill enclosure is all metal. The whole enclosure gets hot when I pound the drive ... I think that is way better for the drive than the OWC one where there is limited heat transfer. One note on the Rosewill, the packaging stated that it was good up to 320GB drives. The 500GB drive works fine in it. The Rosewill has a newer Oxford chipset, but in my performance testing, it was maybe a tad slower than the OWC.

Best of luck to you ...
Click to expand...

Which rosewill enclosure are you referring to? Does it support FW800?
 
OP:

I would suggest that you try to lower the boot up power requirements by changing the jumper settings such that it is in "low spin up" mode or something.

That will make it much more hot-swappable. In many cases (hah pun!) the enclosure does not supply quite enough power if you are always plugging and playing.

Hope that helps as I had crap loads of trouble dealing with it myself.
 
lucifiel said:
OP:

I would suggest that you try to lower the boot up power requirements by changing the jumper settings such that it is in "low spin up" mode or something.

That will make it much more hot-swappable. In many cases (hah pun!) the enclosure does not supply quite enough power if you are always plugging and playing.

Hope that helps as I had crap loads of trouble dealing with it myself.
Click to expand...

Great catch ... I did not see that the original post shows the enclosure using USB to connect with and not FW. If I use this enclosure with USB, I *always* use a double plug USB cable that sucks power from two USB ports on the Mac or PC. Most of the time, I avoid USB both because it does not have the power to run drives like this without using something like two plugs, and it is so slow on a Mac compared to FW800.
 
gwerhart0800 said:
Great catch ... I did not see that the original post shows the enclosure using USB to connect with and not FW. If I use this enclosure with USB, I *always* use a double plug USB cable that sucks power from two USB ports on the Mac or PC. Most of the time, I avoid USB both because it does not have the power to run drives like this without using something like two plugs, and it is so slow on a Mac compared to FW800.
Click to expand...

well, i have a MBA, which means I only have one usb port which took me ages to work out to lower my power consumption, but it does work, and I have yet to notice any real performance hit...

I really would have liked to try FW800, alas i lack the Hardware to do so.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back