I'm offering this update for my postings way back in early June, when I wrote of my experience with the "ME-910U2F" combination firewire & USB enclosure for 2.5" hard drives. This is a nice looking enclosure, fully bootable, and works on Mac OS 9 and X, as well as various Windows OS'.
Breifly, I bought two of them, from computergeeks.com, and both worked fine on the firewire port of my powerbook but failed when connected to the firewire port of various iMac and eMac machines. I'll skip over the details this time, and suffice it to say that the failure was the actual explosion of a capacitor soldered to the board inside the drive housing. Evidently, this is only a problem on desktop Macs because they provide much more current to the Firewire bus than powerbooks do. The drive mechanisms themselves were unharmed. Some listers suggested that the capacitors had been reversed on the motherboard during manufacture, but I don't think that was the issue either. Some sources say that this was due to a bad production run of capacitors, and that only one batch of these housings was affected. Ok, maybe so. Eventually I got both enclosures replaced by computergeeks, who were quite cooperative. However, both replacements also exploded. Because the replacements bore serial numbers far apart from the originals, I am skeptical that the issue was so limited in scope.
I suspect most people would have demanded a refund from computergeeks and been done with it. But I liked the look of these units and wanted them to work!
The ultimate solution was for me to buy a bag of capacitors and replace the exploded ones. This involved removing a dead cap and soldering in a new one. My enclosures now work fine on all computers I've used them on (iMac, eMac, Dell, and Powerbook).
If any of you experience this exploding capacitor problem, and want to try fixing it yourself, at your own risk, here are some useful details: The faulty component is a 220uF, 6.3V, 105C, radial electrolytic capacitor. It sits between the firewire port and the power port, near the edge of the circuit board. Note that there is another capacitor adjacent to it that seems to be ok. They both have the same polarity-orientation on the board, and this will help you remember which way to solder in the new cap. The replacement capacitor is Jameco.com catalog number 158262, sold in packs of ten, for 12c each. It is a 220uF, 25V, 105C, electrolytic radial capacitor. The higher voltage is necessary (I tried a similar 10V cap, but it too failed), and this cap just barely fits into the space on the enclosure board. Yes, you'll pay more for S&H than the price of the capacitors, but it's still less than what you'd pay to send the whole enclosure back for replacement--again and again.
Good Luck!
--Jim.
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 17:56:28 -0500 Subject: Re: Exploding Firewire Enclosures From: Jim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Dear Listers,
I just thought I'd follow-up this story with the recent developments. <...narrative deleted...>
Imagine plugging your nice, shiny external firewire drive into your computer, and moments later hearing an explosion and seeing a jet of smoke shooting out the back of your enclosure! <...long narrative deleted...> --Jim.
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