I replaced a Quantum IDE drive in my external Firewire enclosure. Under OX 10 Panther, I formatted this drive and lost darn near 40% of the advertized space. I know it's normal to lose some to overhead, but THAT much? Any ideas?

Details: Western Digital 200MB Caviar ATA-100 EIDE (typical PC drive-- ordered from Tigerdirect.com) Replaced similar EIDE drive in a Firewire enclosure.

Formats out at: 128MB under Panther.

Thanks for any wisdom on this!

-Mukh

Hmm...
that shouldn't happen. I'd expect a 200 Gb (I assume you mean Gb not Mb) to leave you with well over 180 Gb free space.
Maybe Panther can't handle more than 128 Gb pr unit??
Anyone know about limitations on this ?

I've heard on other forums that you should partition to 128 gig as this is the limit under OS X. Maybe those better informed than myself can offer an explanation for this.

Hello,

Apple's article says that it should handle 4 terabytes.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25557

The thing though is that the partions become very unmanagable. If something goes wrong, how do you backup such a large volume?

I like to see multiple partitions on big disks, just to break them up, and keep them managable. I like making 3 partitions on my systems: 1 for the system files, a second for the applications, and a third for all the data. Then, I backup the data partitions, and go about my day.

Christian

This is not a limit of OS X or HFS+.

It's quite possible that the ATA controller in your firewire enclosure is old. There is a limit on how large a drive they could handle. Newer ATA/5+ can handle volumes larger then 128GB (or 137GB).

Try a newer enclosure, our get a PCI ATA/6 card for inside your Mac and reformt to the proper size (186.2GB).