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OT? Stupidity or selfish/malevolent intent

A neighbor came over to borrow an external disk drive onto which to copy all his "personal files" -- before installing a new OS.

I have several external drives and grabbed a Maxtor (enclosure). It was marked "120GB NTFS" which wouldn't be enough for him. So, I replaced the drive with a 500GB drive ("500GB NTFS") and sent him on his way.

A while later, he returned claiming the drive wasn't big enough (WTF? He's not that heavy of a user to have maxxed out the drive). Fearing the 500G drive may not have been blank/newly formatted (despite coming from the box that ONLY contains blank drives), I quickly checked it on one of my machines.

When the drive reported as 127GB, I knew the likely problem.

But, on reflection, realized it was NOT the problem I was assuming but, rather, a more insidious one related to this particular enclosure.

[I gave him a 1B drive and let him continue his "exercise"]

This enclosure has a "problem" in that it doesn't just limit the capacity of the internal drive to 127GB but also ALTERS the drive's capacity so it will thereafter THINK it is a 127GB drive (i.e., even when removed from the enclosure and placed in an "unconstraining" enclosure).

The problem is unique to this brand of enclosure, this model number and some range of S/N's (firmware revision).

The enclosures are nice because:

- they are aluminum (instead of plastic)

- they use screw fasteners (instead of plastic "latches"/snaps)

- they have power switches (instead of being on when powered)

- they have USB & FW interfaces hence the reason I keep them around.

[I have several other "identical" enclosures that do not have this problem. No doubt, I stuffed a 120GB drive in that enclosure because it would not be thusly affected as it was < 127GB.]

To be more specific, the enclosure exhibits this behavior when the drive inside is NOT a Maxtor drive.

The Cynic says this is Maxtor being pricks -- not wanting their enclosures to be used to host drives from other manufacturers (silly as you can't buy a bare enclosure -- so, you've already purchased *a* Maxtor drive if you have a Maxtor enclosure!).

But, as I have other "identical" Maxtor enclosures that don't exhibit this "problem", it is also possible that it was a bug that Maxtor fixed. (Or, such an annoying "feature" that their customers rebelled BEFORE the enclosure reached EoL).

So, here's the question: Is there any legitimate reason why the software might have been designed to behave in this way? I.e., were they, perhaps, NOT "being pricks" but, rather, doing something legitimate and possibly plagued by a bug they hadn't foreseen?

I can, for example, imagine them trying to "recognize" the drive and taking some alternate action if it was unrecognizable. I can also imagine them relying on the drive having knowledge of its capacity INSTEAD OF caching that capacity in the microcontroller and using it to validate request to access LBA's on the medium (i.e., submit the request to the drive and let IT claim it's a bad block number instead of performing that test BEFORE submitting the request to the drive).

I've marked the enclosure so this sort of thing never happens, again (it's an extra chore to restore the drive's native capacity after its been mucked with in this way). But, I'd like to know how much slack I should give the developers for this; or, attribute it to malevolent/selfish intent.

Reply to
Don Y
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Bwahahaha... s.b. "1TB"

Reply to
Don Y

127GB is the limit for Win9x. The FAT32 file system can go larger than that, but the operating system can't safely use it. MS even deliberately prevented WinXP from being able to format FAT32 space larger then 127GB.
Reply to
Thousands

Terabyte USB drives are great.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Reply to
John Larkin

That sidesteps the question.

The microcontroller in the *external* drive can do whatever it wants to make the drive appear whatever SIZE it wants. I don't see any reason why it would let Maxtor drives claim to be whatever they are... but deliberately tell other drives to limit themselves to 127GB (why not just ACT as if the drives were 127GB without TELLING the drive to limit itself, thusly)?

Reply to
Don Y

No kidding? ;-) Seriously, though, life's a lot simpler if you just avoid computers altogether. They're a total PITA. They're not as bad as they used to be, I grant you, but they're still well worth avoiding for the sake of your mental health. Analogue rules!

Reply to
Cursitor Doom

My guess is that the manufacturer was able to save a few pennies somewhere on the control electronics by only allowing drive sizes up to the size stated on the box, rather than supporting either the entire 2TB FAT32 address limit, or some arbitrary much larger choice of limit for NTFS.

So between stupidity and malevolent intent my suggestion is: money ;-)

(external USB enclosures are very cheap these days, here's one that says its supports up to 8TB for $19.99 on Amazon:

formatting link

Reply to
bitrex

That's not the case. Note a 500G drive in a case that intentionally LIMITS THE DRIVE'S CAPABILITY (not just the enclosure's) to 127GB -- but *only* if the drive is not made by Maxtor. (e.g., the enclosure is marked "250GB" so you KNOW it can support a drive larger than 127GB -- indeed, I have several with 500GB drives in them)

My question is why it "told the *drive*" that it was ONLY 127GB. It doesn't tell 250GB Maxtor drives that they are only 127GB. It doesn't tell 120GB drives that they are 127GB. It just tells "non-Maxtor drives exceeding 127GB" that they are ONLY 127GB drives.

I have other enclosures (e.g., for external optical media) that will LIMIT the size REPORTED BY THE USB ENCLOSURE to 127GB. But, will not PERMANENTLY ALTER the characteristics of the drive housed within; remove the drive and it again reports its correct, native capacity.

(reread my post)

If "money" is the issue, then that falls into the malevolent class as all they are doing is PREVENTING me from buying, e.g., a 250GB enclosure, populated with one of THEIR 250GB drives, and later replacing the drive with a (>127GB) drive from some other manufacturer. Are they hoping to lock me into buying a replacement (bare) drive from Maxtor? And, the fact that other instances of the same enclosure (same stated capacity, etc.) don't suffer from this behavior is the result of a "bug fix" ("innocent stupidity in the other release") *or* "market pressure" (folks complaining about their "malevolence")?

Reply to
Don Y

It's not about pennies. It's about standards and firmware. Possibly Maxtor adopted an identification method for their disks' size that was later superseded by a standard. But, the firmware in the enclosure's controller worked fine with the proprietary identification regime, and Maxtor didn't need to update it when SATA standards (or whatever) specified a slightly different method.

It's even possible (and at one time, was rather usual) to have a disk drive firmware that takes an update; if your non-Maxtor disk has a factory firmware that needs updating, you wouldn't usually know that beforehand. Disks that have

512-byte sectors and have 127GB capacity need a sector count of 256 million (28 bit number); with 4096-byte sectors, it'd be 25 bits. Perhaps there was some variation in where to look for the next MSB bits.
Reply to
whit3rd

You can't just wipe the drive?

It would be interesting if you merely zeroed the partition sector and worked with that (tends to then act as a totally blank drive to almost any software).

Of course, above tricks are useless if the idiots buggered the on-board HD CPU registers with proprietary software..

Reply to
Robert Baer

Well, a one byte HD *IS* close to being as useful as a write-only drive.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Slide rules are great! 3-digit accuracy, good enough for almost ALL engineering purposes. With a computer, tho, you can use the 20 digit printout to bullshit almost anything.

Reply to
Robert Baer

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