USB 3 SATA enclosure limited to 2 TB drives?

[mbosse]

Hello all:

I just acquired an ICY BOX IB-318STU3-B USB 3.0 enclosure for 3.5" SATA HDDs. I tried putting a 4 TB Seagate Ironwolf inside which would power up, but not show in Disk Utility. I also tried with a 8 TB WD Red and a 3 TB WD Green - same result.

1, 1.5 and 2 TB drives however would work normally. The seller claims on his Windows machine the 4 TB Seagate and enclosure work normally together (which I believe is true as he (i) offers to take it back and (ii) its the second USB 3.0 to SATA enclosure I came across which shows this behaviour).

When I put above drives in another (ChilliGreen) USB 3.0 to SATA enclosure they all work fine.

Systems used are (both show same behaviour):

1. MacBook Air M2 on Sequoia 15.5
2. MacBook Air Mid 2014 on Big Sur 11.7.10

Any idea what is going on here?

Thanks a lot,
Magnus

 

[PaulD-UK]

Since the last supported OS is Win 7, that enclosure dates from before 2012...
Its chipset will be 32 bit, which "use 32-bit block addresses, imposing a 2 TiB limit for devices with 512 byte blocks."
Enclosures since that date will have 64 bit controller chips, allowing storage up to ~8 Zebibytes (GigaTerabytes ).
Maybe it will work with a larger drive, if you partition it with two <2TB partitions before you put it in the enclosure,
although I seem to remember that only the first partition may be visible in MacOS (pre-Catalina)?

Vendor specs confirm this:
Manufacturer code: IB-318StU3-B
• HDD capacity 3.5" up to 2 TB
• Supports: PC & Mac (Windows XP/Vista/7)
• USB 3.0 ((Micro Typ Connector) up to 5.0Gbps)
• System requirement:
- USB 2.0 Win98/2000/WinXP/Vista/Win7/2003/MAC9.1/Linux
- USB 3.0 WinXP/Vista/Win7/2003

 

[mbosse]

Since the last supported OS is Win 7, that enclosure dates from before 2012...
Its chipset will be 32 bit, which "use 32-bit block addresses, imposing a 2 TiB limit for devices with 512 byte blocks."
Enclosures since that date will have 64 bit controller chips, allowing storage up to ~8 Zebibytes (GigaTerabytes ).
Maybe it will work with a larger drive, if you partition it with two <2TB partitions before you put it in the enclosure,
although I seem to remember that only the first partition may be visible in MacOS (pre-Catalina)?

Vendor specs confirm this:
Manufacturer code: IB-318StU3-B
• HDD capacity 3.5" up to 2 TB
• Supports: PC & Mac (Windows XP/Vista/7)
• USB 3.0 ((Micro Typ Connector) up to 5.0Gbps)
• System requirement:
- USB 2.0 Win98/2000/WinXP/Vista/Win7/2003/MAC9.1/Linux
- USB 3.0 WinXP/Vista/Win7/2003

Great answer, thanks a lot!