Firewire limitations?

[BarneyFife]

I'm interested in purchasing a 250 gb maxtor hd and putting in a firewire enclosure. Will it show up as 250gb or is there a limit?

 

[Duvie]

I do not know of any limitations in winxp...What OS??? Will you run NTFS or Fat32??? I know someolder mobos may not be able to recognize the HDD correctly....

Are you plan on partitioning any???

 

[skatertech]

There is no real limit with the FireWire bus, more with the OS, drivers, partition type. Are you planning on using a 250gb partition with XP?

Does your motherboard support FireWire drives? Your bios may have a limit.

 

[Eug]

I think most Firewire enclosures might only see up to 128 GB, but I'm not sure. I do know some support more than this though.

 

[skatertech]

Wouldn't that be bypassed if the OS accessed the device directly? The only hardware limit I can see would be if he wanted his BIOS to boot from it.

 

[Pariah]

Maxtor is releasing a 250GB firewire drive shortly if it isn't out already. I'd just wait for that one and avoid any problems.

 

[BarneyFife]

I'm using XP Pro as my os and my motherboard is a asus p4s333 and plan on using it as ntfs. I want to use is as 1 partition basically for media storage.

 

[skatertech]

Should be no problem, as long as you do not want to boot from it. Even then, it's a fairly recent board.

I would still reccomend multiple partitions, though.

 

[Pariah]

There's no reason to parition a drive for large media storage.

The ATA- to firewire bridge could be limited to 128GB which is why I would just wait for the Maxtor version. After adding up the cost of the drive and the enclosure it would probably be cheaper to go with Maxtor anyway.

 

[skatertech]

If you know the general size of your media, then it is much less of a headache to you and whoever else uses the system if you partition.

Heres my drive setup at work:

E: Project 1 - 18gb
F: Project 2 - 40gb
G: Project 3 - 40gb
H: Project 4 - 60gb
I: Project 5 - 60gb
J: Project 6 - 120gb

This is a very expensive editor using several SCSI RAID drives, but it's the same basic idea. For those really long projects, we just go over to the next unused partition.

 

[RichieZ]

I kno the oxford 911 bridge works up to at least 160GB, I so I assume it would work with a 250GB drive since it has the 48bit LBA