Thinkpads Forum

I have a subject drive (well, 2 actually) and I have successfully replaced the drives with 100GB and 120GB drives and I regularly swap them around.

I have just received two 250GB drives but am having weird problems with them when they are in the USB 2.0 drive case. Is there a limit to the size of the drive I can put in the case?

I've 1TB external drive, connecting it to my thinkpad via USB enclosure shows exactly the actual size.

Are those 250GB of the correct type, i.e. PATA/ATA-6/ATA-100/IDE/EIDE or are they SATA?

They are PATA drives (WD2500BEVE) and they work fine in the UltraBay.

I'm talking specifically about the "IBM Portable 40GB USB 2.0 Hard Drive" enclosure. I know other USB 2.0 enclosure support larger drives.

After doing some testing it does appear that the interface in the enclosure only supports up to around 131GB.

The first drive I partitioned and formatted in the UltraBay. It works perfectly in the UltraBay but I get sector errors when used in the subject enclosure.

The second drive I partitioned and formatted using WindowsXP in the enclosure and it only created a 131GB partition. The rest of the drive could not be seen. When I put the drive in the UltraBay I could see the missing space. I resized it with PartitionMagic and then it would not work at all in the enclosure. I put it back into the UltraBay and resized it back to 131GB and it works fine in both places.

My guess is there are some pins missing in the interface in the enclosure.

It has something to do with the 137GB limit i think. I think that the chipset of your USB > IDE controller is not supporting big disks