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External Hard Drive

Reading the reviews in the link for the case, it looks like it's pretty picky about the type of drives it works with. Maybe take it back and get a different case. 🙂
 
i bought a mad dog usb/fw case from circuit city.
popped in the drive i took out of a bytecc enclosure.
hooked it up to apx"n"
reads fine.

can't write to the drive or delete files from it.
when trying to copy files to it it says:
you cannot copy some of these items to the destination because their names are too long for the destination.
when trying to delete files from it it says:
error code -50

works fine connected directly to the macbook on both fw and usb

called mad dog. no support for it in this circumstance.
will take mad dog back for refund.

the bytecc works fine, but have always had heat issues or something with it after about 1/2 hour or so. it goes down (connected directly fw/usb or on apx.
i thought maybe it was the drive originally so i bought another drive and got the same problem so i bought the mad dog enclosure which i can't write to. but i can play itunes all night long with the mad dog without problem.
 
I have the first external case and it works fine with my Macbook. You just need to reformat it to Mac OS extended through the Disk Utility Program.
 
I'm getting this problem too and trying to figure out what is causing it and how to prevent it. Any ideas are appreciated. Below are my notes.

20091003 - A hard drive named Earth on our Airport Extreme Network USB port has been occasionally giving the message "you cannot copy some of these items to the destination because their names are too long for the destination." which makes it so I can't copy files to it. This happens even with files with the name X. It is not a foreign language character name problem. The Earth is formatted MacOS with Journaling turned on. It happens to be a RAID 1 [Mirroring] drive but I don't think that is the problem. The problem does not happen when the drive is directly connected to a computer via Firewire or USB, only when on the Airport Extreme. I am using Tiger MacOS10.4.11 with everything up to date.

Running various disk utilities on it makes it look like it fixes the problem but really it is fixed because of turning the drive on/off/on or the remounting it on the network. There are no problems with the disk.

Turning the drive off is a temporary fix but the problem returns after a few hours and I don't like turning it off.

Restarting the Airport Extreme by doing and Update via Airport Utility also temporarily fixes the problem. I just used Airport Utility😀isks:Filesharing and set "Airport Disks Guest Access" to "Read and Write". This may also solve the problem of the one MacBook Leopard MacOS10.5 of not being able to write to the disk.

Update: the problem is back so ReadWrite didn't fix it. I've been trying other setting adjustments to no avail. The problem seems to reappear after a while. I haven't found anything that is causing it such as access by one particular machine, etc. Letting the drive spin down does not consistently cause the problem either.

(Edit: I had written Express where I meant Extreme.)
 
m85476585 said:
Did you have the cable plugged into two USB ports?
Click to expand...

The USB cable runs from the USB port on the hard drive to the USB port on the Airport Extreme. There are no other devices plugged into either the hard drive or the Airport Extreme. The cable is securely plugged in at both ends.

Thoughts?
 
I was referring to the OP's problem. The Vantec enclosure, and most portable 2.5" enclosures have a USB cable for data and one for power, or one cable that plugs into two ports on the computer for data and power. Sometimes one USB port cannot supply enough power, causing unpredictable behavior.

I don't know if you could do this with an airport. Depending on the drive, the cable might connect the power from the data port and the power from the power port, which would be very bad if one of them was plugged into the airport and the other was plugged into a computer or hub. The other way they could do it is have the power cable replace the power from the data cable, so power would come only from the computer/hub and the data would go to the airport.

If the enclosure works the second way, taking power only from either the data cable or the power cable, plugging both cables into the same computer shouldn't have any effect.
 
Interesting way to do the power. In my drive's case there is a separate power supply connection.
 
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