I got a Micro Plus ME-720 external USB/Firewire drive enclosure
and put a 250GB Maxtor drive into it. Plugged it into my stock 
Redhat 9 (2.4.20-6 kernel) system and it works great HOWEVER 
only 200GB is recognized by FDISK. 

The manual makes no mention of Linux, but does say that
"There is a maximum capcity of 127GB drive for USB2.0 and a 
maximum capacity of 160GB for 1394 (firewire)." 

The device uses an Oxford 911 chipset to control the interface.
I did find an advertisement for another similar case with that 
chipset that stated it "worked with drives up to 200GB". 

Does anyone know what causes these limits and will I run
into trouble when I start using the back end of the drive? 
And is there a way to use the remaining 50GB? I notice that
Maxtor sells a combined case/drive with 250GB (the 5000xt model).
I would be interested in that, if it worked with RH. I worry
that it might depend on special windows drivers to work.

I am aware that LBA addressing is required for drives greater
than 137GB, but surely if the ME-720 goes to 200GB, it must
support LBA-48. So what else could cause a size limit?

The ultimate aim is to provide offsite backup for several
terabytes of home directories. USB or Firewire is nice because
the hot-plug feature seems to work very well - just umount the
drive and remove, or insert and mount. Write speed is about 25/35
megabytes/second for USB/Firewire. Either is satisfactory since
we only update changed files. We tried IDE carriers, but while
we had no trouble removing drives, adding them hung the system.

Any information appreciated.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg of nber dotte org

Daniel Feenberg wrote:

> The ultimate aim is to provide offsite backup for several
> terabytes of home directories. USB or Firewire is nice because
> the hot-plug feature seems to work very well - just umount the
> drive and remove, or insert and mount. Write speed is about 25/35
> megabytes/second for USB/Firewire. Either is satisfactory since
> we only update changed files. We tried IDE carriers, but while
> we had no trouble removing drives, adding them hung the system.
> 

Have you considered serial ATA?

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