External Harddrive Help

diablojota

diablojota

Doctoral Student
Hi, I have an external firewire case for 3.5" drives. I recently took out the 10GB harddrive that I had in there and replaced it with a 160GB drive. However, once I initialized the disk, I only had 126GB available. The drive is supposed to have 160. Is there some way of getting this disk space back? Is there some way that I should be formatting this?
 
I believe your Mac will only recognise 128GB on the hd. That is a limitation with the G3 models. Hope this helps. :(
 
No, it's not a limitation of the Mac, it's a limitation of the Firewire case. See if the manufacturer has a firmware upgrade for it.

The Mac will see the entire drive if it's in a Firewire case that is capable of large disk support.
 
diablojota said:
Hi, I have an external firewire case for 3.5" drives. I recently took out the 10GB harddrive that I had in there and replaced it with a 160GB drive. However, once I initialized the disk, I only had 126GB available. The drive is supposed to have 160. Is there some way of getting this disk space back? Is there some way that I should be formatting this?
Click to expand...

Your situation may not be quite as bad as it seems. That is, 1 gigabyte = about (a): 1,073,741,824 bytes. A 160 GB drive, rather than having 160 GB of space, actually has (b): 160,000,000,000 bytes of space. 160 X {(b) / [(a) X 160]} = about 149. So, a 160 GB drive that has no bad sectors should start with about 149 GB. If a 160 GB drive has bad sectors that are within the drive manufacturer's tolerances, then it will start with less than about 149 GB. So, 149 (at best) - 126 = 23 is not as 160 - 126 = 34.
 
In this case, it's not the math -- it's as bobw said: some FireWire IDE controllers (as well as Macintosh computers pre-MDD) cannot handle drives larger than 137.4GB, and will treat any hard drive with a capacity greater than 137.4GB as a mere 137GB drive. A formatted 137.4GB drive will be approximately 126GB.

48-bit LBA is required for drives larger than 137.4GB, and it seems that the FireWire case you've got doesn't support that. There may or may not be a firmware upgrade to allow 48-bit LBA.

http://www.48bitlba.com/
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
In this case, it's not the math --
Click to expand...

I wasn't saying it is the math. I was saying that the poster is not as short of drive space as it might seem because of the controller limitation.
 
Hehe... understood. But the man is missing 15% of his drive's capacity. For some, that may be negligible, but 15% (20GB) is a lot of space!
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Hehe... understood. But the man is missing 15% of his drive's capacity. For some, that may be negligible, but 15% (20GB) is a lot of space!
Click to expand...

I agree. :)
 
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