Anyone having problems with the OWC 2.5" Aluminum enclosure?

[C(-)ris]

I bought two of theOWC Mercury Express 2.5" Portable Aluminum FireWire 400+USB 2.0/1.1 Combo Enclosures last week to make use of hard drives that came out of upgraded systems. A 20GB IBM and a 16GB Apple HD from a Pismo. Both of them seem to freeze up durring large data transfers, I tried swapping drives and enclosures but it didn't make a diffrence. Tried adding a AC power adapter, didn't help. The drives are good, I tested them before and after in the systems they came out of. Tried these drives on 2 machines, a G5 2.0ghz DC and my 1ghz Albook. Both running 10.4.x(5 and 6)

The problems only occur in large file transfers after two or three GBs. The drives format fine, and they do smaller transfers fine as well. One of them makes a beeping sound every once in a while and will die and the light will go out. The other, the transfer just slows a down to a crawl and then stops. The machine gives an error that says the data could not be read or written.

Has anyone else had issues with these enclosures? I am working with their tech support, but I wonder if I am the only one seeing these problems or not.

[OWC Larry]

We've had no issues with the literally THOUSANDS of those enclosures we've shipped over the years and we ship another thousand about every couple months on that case.

So - first question that comes to mind - what application is being used to initialize them? I assume disk utility? Do the drives then pass full verification tests?

The drive that is beeping I'd bet is a IBM. That isn't really a good sign, btw.

Regardless - hopefully there is a good, simple explanation/solution so you can have use of the two HDs.

[C(-)ris]

It is an IBM drive beeping. I'm guessing it is a known problem? I formatted them in disk utility..writting zeros, they format fine. I noticed the chip on the bottom of the case says Inito on it, but your website says it is a Prolific? I am going to have another HD coming in soon, a 60GB out of a tibook to throw in the case to see what is happening. I wish I could figure out what the problem is... I tried diffrent FW cables. I suppose I could have 2 bad drives...anyhing is possible. I am going to try them in some other machines running 10.3 or earlier 10.4s.

[New.Dad]

Looks like Larry is spot on, there is something wrong with your IBM drive, an then it's only one drive left, which could also be defective, it's not that unlikely at this point...

please let us know how it turns out, I would like to buy one of these portable drives to backup an iBook.

[blusubaru]

I've had the same trouble with mine Chris, random beeping during a large file transfer or on surface scans. I'm running a 60gb tibook pulled drive. I also have a Meritline 60gb that has an identical 60gb drive in it. However that one seems to run flawlessly on the same processes without beeping. I have swapped the drives back and forth and only get the beeping from the one drive in the OWC/Mercury case. Spooky!