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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Known Limitations Reusing 3.5" USB External Cases (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by 9dave@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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Most of us remember when external HDDs could be had cheaper than similar bare drives, had this reason to shuck drives, or had a drive failure so had 3.5" USB external HDD cases left over.

Have you found any limitations in reusing the cases with new drives, especially supporting higher capacity HDDs?

I don't recall all the cases I have but thinking Hitachi XL, or Seagate GoFlex/Expansion/Backup Plus Hub, cases that came with around 2TB to 4TB HDDs in them originally.

I did some research and it may depend on whether they use 32bit LBA or 64bit addressing, implying that cases from 2TB or smaller products may not support over 2TB:

https://superuser.com/questions/308492/is-there-a-size-limit-on-external-usb-hard-drives

Is there a way to determine this, a list, or do I need to get the chip ID of one of the chips and can look it up from that or is it also firmware related?

I have also seen reports that some cases only address 4TB worth of a larger drive's capacity which leaves me wondering why, how can they address more than 2TB but not more than 4TB. I lost the links to some of those but here is one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/bwwqkl/comment/eq0znyx/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I'm hoping for replies from people who have faced a capacity limitation when reusing a USB enclosure, details of that and especially if it was one of the models I mentioned above.

I'm aware of the encryption issue with WD Mybooks but never bought any of those for that reason.

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[–] Far_Marsupial6303@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

IMO, all major manufacturer (WD/HGST, Seagate, Toshiba) enclosures and components, interface and power supply are trash and not worth keeping or using. Too poor cooling, necessarily cheap, low quality components prone to failure. Not worth the effort trying to figure out which ones support >4TB drives or not.

That said, to break the 2TB barrier, early 3 & 4TB USB interfaces emulated 512K sectors from the native 4K sector drives. This is why with 32bit XP, you couldn't natively read a >2TB drive without the interface.

I don't remember when this ended as I moved on to to Vista as soon as it was introduced. Yes, not a great choice for other things, but at least I could use any size drive! ;-p