On Apr 16, 2011, at 9:23 PM, tortoise wrote:
Product ID: 0x00db Vendor ID: 0x0dc4 (Macpower & Tytech Technology Co., LTD.) Version: 0.00
I believe this is a problematic USB chipset. This appears to be an enclosure built upon the "ALI M5621" chipset. I have one enclosure with this chipset and it required several firmware updates, and still is not reliable mounting on a Mac under OS X. This is definitely an OS X issue because I was using this on several hackintosh, both a laptop and a desktop, and the USB 2.0 worked fine under WinXP and Ubuntu (although Linux sites say this chipset is problematic with Linux), but caused problems under OS X. It never mounted with the original firmware, and the final version I updated to got it to mount about 60-70% of the time, but the transfer rates seemed slow, but at least it worked WHEN IT MOUNTED. I never experienced any data corruption. I did try many other ways to force it to mount, only the newer firmware helped. Your firmware is listed as "0.00" which normally is an initial firmware that has never been updated.
If you have a Windows PC you may be able to run a firmware update program and improve the function. The latest firmware I'm aware of for the ALI M5621 is version "TH07" available from <http://www.byteccusa.com/download/ >.
Since this is an OWC enclosure you might contact them first, but I'm unaware that OWC has ever posted any firmware updates. If you flash this the Product & Vendor IDs will be changed. I'm not certain if the flash program has any way to save a copy of the old firmware, so you might be flying blind if you can't save the original firmware before updating. My enclosure based upon the ALI M5621 was NOT made by Bytecc, but Bytecc seems to be the only site posting firmware for this chipset, and it helped me get my unmountable HD to finally mount in OS X.
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