FireWire hard drives - WD

petermcmacpetermcmac
in Peripherals

Hi,

My 1st post, apologies in advance for my newbie-ness.

I've inherited a really nice 27" 2010 iMac, fully spec'ed out, with a FireWire 800 outlet, and 2 WD MyBook cases with FW800 ports (drives removed).
I put a spare WD Blue 4TB in one of the cases and it works nicely, but apparently there is only 1.8 TB of memory. I believe this is because of the WD motherboard (# 4061-705017-003) limiting the apparent capacity to 1.8 TB.

So I'm wondering, is there a software or hardware hack around this limitation?

I'm using the iMac to store and view family pictures and films, and want the FW drives as back ups. And forgive me for being a Luddite, but I've always liked the FW interface, it's fast and smooth.

Thanks in advance for any help out there!

Cheers,

Peter

Comments

  • stephanstephan

    Hello @petermcmac,

    welcome on board and no fear! We love it when you keep old systems running.

    I did a little research and also found some information about that specific Oxford chipset, but none of it mentioned some detail on max. capacity. Therefore you may be out of luck and and are limited to your mentioned number - in case the chipset is the factor.

    Maybe you have formatted the drives with a Master Boot Record (MBR), which is limited to around 2 GB. If you can change that to GPT, maybe you are lucky and you can use a little more space (although there are also enclosures with 3 GB limit as I have experienced). But it is worth a try. Just reformat it in the Disk Utility.

    Otherwise, you may want to use some newer enclosure with up to date chipsets. Hope that helps (another FW fan here :)).

    Cheers,
    Stephan

Sign In or Register to comment.

© Vanilla Keystone Theme 2024