SATA->USB Enclosure for 2TB HDD

[reggie14]

I just got a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green (EADS) drive that I want to use for back-up purposes. I'm trying to find a hard drive enclosure that will work with it. I've tried 4 different enclosures, and none of them work with it. 3 out of the 4 are Eagle Tech enclosures (since that's what Microcenter mostly has), two of which say on the box that they're suppose to support 2TB drives. But, none of those work. I just tried a CP Technologies enclosure, and that doesn't work either.

The only SATA->USB adapter that worked was this really, really cheap one that I got for free from newegg once upon a time when I bought a hard drive. It's not even an enclosure, just a IDE/SATA->USB dongle, with a separate power adapter. I'm not going to use that permanently though.

For now I have the drive in one of my computers, but I'd really like to make it an external hard drive. Is anyone successfully using an enclosure with a 2TB hard drive?

[davephan]

I've used the same Eagle Tech USB hard drive enclosures I bought at Microcenter. I have a couple of them. I know that they work with 1.0 TB and 1.5 TB drives. I don't think I've tried them with my 2.0 TB WD green drives though.

Is it possible to mount the 2.0 TB WD green drive in your case instead?

Dave

[reggie14]

I put it in my workstation computer for the time being. But, eventually I'd like to use it as a sort of off-site backup. I want to try to back-up important files (and maybe full images) of my computers about once a month, and keep it outside my apartment the rest of the time. But, I don't want to have to open my case each time I do that.

I guess I'll make another trip to Microcenter and see if there are any other enclosures to try. It might be a Western Digital thing. I saw a few similar complaints on the WD forums.

[jgscott987]

I know that there are some compatibility issues with the new 'green' drives (not just Western Digital's). The issues seem to stem from the drives spinning down on their own, causing them to lose connection with the host.

With that said, the drive should at least work when you turn it on. The problems I've read about generally involve a drive disappearing after a period of time.

I'm interested to hear what you come up with.

[Tiki]

I read something recently about some of the new 2TB drives using a different sector size. Apparently you need to load special software in WinXP to make these drives work, but Win7 and Vista are supposed to have native support. Perhaps the SATA to USB converters get tripped up over this too?

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I read something recently about some of the new 2TB drives using a different sector size. Apparently you need to load special software in WinXP to make these drives work, but Win7 and Vista are supposed to have native support. Perhaps the SATA to USB converters get tripped up over this too?

I don't have any trouble using 2 TB SATA WD green drives in my Windows XP Pro system. No additional software was needed for them to work with Windows XP Pro. I haven't tried the drives in the USB hard drive enclosure.

Dave

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by jgscott987

With that said, the drive should at least work when you turn it on. The problems I've read about generally involve a drive disappearing after a period of time.

The hard drive worked one time in the enclosures, in one of my XP computers. I was never able to get it to work again in any of the enclosures on any of my computers. In each case, Windows detected that I plugged in a USB device. With the EagleTech drives, nothing happened. That is, windows didn't try to install any drivers (but, maybe that's because I had other EagleTech enclosures before this one). In the CP Technologies case, it tried to install a driver, but it driver installation failed. I tried to manually install a driver off the vendor's website, but that failed too.

I've given up on the hard drive enclosure with this thing. Maybe I'll try again in a few months if I see a another new model that explicitly claims 2TB support. I'm guessing that you're right that this is a compatibility problem with WD's energy saving features.

Originally Posted by Tiki

I read something recently about some of the new 2TB drives using a different sector size. Apparently you need to load special software in WinXP to make these drives work, but Win7 and Vista are supposed to have native support. Perhaps the SATA to USB converters get tripped up over this too?

The WD Green EARS drives are the advanced format drives that use 4k sectors. Due to the WinXP compatibility issues I got an older EADS drive, which still uses the old sector size.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by davephan

I don't have any trouble using 2 TB SATA WD green drives in my Windows XP Pro system. No additional software was needed for them to work with Windows XP Pro. I haven't tried the drives in the USB hard drive enclosure.

Dave

The issue I was thinking of is the transition from 512-byte to 4-kByte hard drive sectors.

It is only on certain models (currently just certain model#s of 2TB Western Digital HDDs, but not all 2TB Western Digitals).

Here is an in-depth article from Anandtech.com that explains:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691

After further reading, it is not clear to me that these drives would not work with a USB adaptor, but I still wouldn't be surprised if they had some issues.