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From: GT on 23 Oct 2009 06:28
I've been looking at a few external drive caddies, but the cheap ones
mention that they can take up to 400GB hard drive. Why the limit? Doesn't
seem right to me - surely a SATA controller (internal or external) could
manage any current size of SATA driver?


From: Paul on 23 Oct 2009 08:23
GT wrote:
> I've been looking at a few external drive caddies, but the cheap ones
> mention that they can take up to 400GB hard drive. Why the limit? Doesn't
> seem right to me - surely a SATA controller (internal or external) could
> manage any current size of SATA driver?
>

I'd like to know the same thing. I've seen a variety of enclosures
that have limits that don't correspond to standards issues. And
never an explanation of why.

Paul

From: kony on 23 Oct 2009 17:23
On Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:28:16 +0100, "GT"
<ContactGT_rem_ov_e_(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

>I've been looking at a few external drive caddies, but the cheap ones
>mention that they can take up to 400GB hard drive. Why the limit? Doesn't
>seem right to me - surely a SATA controller (internal or external) could
>manage any current size of SATA driver?
>


I always thought it was due to limitations of the bridge
chip used, but why it would be designed with such a limit is
the question. I would guess it has to do with the amount of
memory the chip has, that they limited that to make them
cheaper in the past, but now it is too much of a limit on
product desirability so only the old models will have that
limit.

On the other hand just today I received an external docking
caddy that lists a 2TB limit which seems a lot better than
400GB, but since 2TB drives already exist it is fairly
inevitable that it too will eventually be unable to handle
future drives.

That docking caddy has one of the JMicron chips in it, I
don't recall which one but think it's one of the JM2033(n)
series and those chip briefs/PDFs don't mention anything
about a HDD capacity limit, but some do claim "Support
ATA/ATAPI LBA48 bit addressing mode".

Guess I can't complain too much, got it free as a newegg
combo special.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.272964
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