too many words by laura lemay

enclosure trouble

Bah. I hate hardware.

A couple months ago I had bought a. a giant hard drive b. a combo firewire/USB 2.0 external enclosure to put it in. My fabulous theory was to use the giant hard drive for music and backups. Of course then I got insanely busy with work and both the giant hard drive and enclosure sat in my office in their original boxes mouldering away and losing value by the day.

I installed them last week and connected the hard drive to my mac via firewire and for a short time I was awash in Too! Much! Disk Space! Joy! And then as I was copying some files over the enclosure vanished in the middle of a write. The mac bitterly complained. And the disk was nowhere to be found in a scan of the firewire, uh, bus? (is it a bus?)

It took a reboot to get it back again. And then after half an hour or so it vanished again. This was not good.

Wanting badly to use my new giant hard drive I switched the enclosure to USB. I could now use the hard drive, but my god, USB was slow. And it seems to swallow up everything else on the machine while its being used. I get lots of spinning pizzas while its writing to the disks. This is not good.

I was puzzled about this for a while because I thought the external hard drive was USB 2.0. I figured that perhaps I just bought the suckiest external hard drive enclosure in the world. And then some poking about turned up the real problem: my Mac actually only supports plain USB. Oh. argh.

So today I did what I should have done in the first place: I copied everything from my moderatedly large second internal hard drive over to the external, and then moved the external hard drive into my mac. So now I am back to Too! Much! Disk Space! Joy!

Screw enclosures. Bah.