Maxtor Ultra Hard Drive formatting for Mac?

[Carol Gancia]

I just bought a Maxtor Ultra16 300GB internal hard drive and a case enclosure for my Mac. My Macbook Pro does not want to read it. Does anyone know how to make it work without buying the ATA/133 PCI card?

I had a 200GB Maxtor drive installed on my imac G5 a few months ago. The salesperson at the store taught me a trick to install it successfully so that it reads 180GB of the disk. I lost the information and can't find that person anymore.

Any feedback will be most appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help!

[Dave Perry]

I'm not sure if the procedure for intel Macs is different than PPC Macs but you should not have any trouble using it out of the box. It's best, however, to use Disck Utility to reformat it as Mac OS Extended (NOT journaled).

Also, hope the enclosure you bought is FW rather than USB.

On you G5, you shouldn't have to do any "tricks" to have the Mac read the full 200 gigs. I don't know what the sales person was talking about.

[Carol Gancia]

Thanks a lot, Dave. I already bought a USB enclosure but I can probably still return it. In what ways is the fw enclosure better than the usb one?

My macbook pro only has one fw port though. So, I will not be able to use the exernal drive on fw along with the video deck during digitizing. I can probably do the firewire enclosure on the G5.

[Dave Perry]

One FW port is usually not a problem. I cut, at home, on a Mac Mini with one FW port. I have a LaCie D2 hardrive, Lacie D2 DVD burner, a small bus powered FW drive that I made from an old laptop drive, and my camera/deck all on the same bus with no problems. At work we do have a separate FW bus for our AJA Io, used for capturing analog video sources, but all of the 7 FW 800 and FW 400 drive we use, share the same bus.

You can't daisey chain USB drives like you can FW and USB requires more system resources to operate than FW. I can't remember the specifics, but I read an article explaining the differences and why even though USB 2.0 is rated at higher transfer speeds than FW 400, FW 400 still ends up being faster. The FW drives act as "Peer" devices and can interact with each other rather than having the OS run things. That probably didn't help much and maybe someone else will chime in, BUT, you'll find that all professional Mac users will tell you to use FW over USB for video media capture and storage.