As others have said, without an identifiable manufacturer you won't be able to find out history on a particular model. That said, there should be /something/ on the unit to identify it.
The various log files and ls<foo> commands and all the zillions of files in /proc and /sys can tell you which chipset the enclosure uses. No, I can't tell you which files or commands, you will have to spend half an hour researching that yourself, but Linux squirrels away a lot of configuration information. Then find another product that uses that chipset, and learn about it. For size - just try a large drive (borrow one from a friend) and see. There is nothing in the specs of eSata interfaces that impose an arbitrary constraint at 500GB. The limit may actually be power - larger drives consume slightly more power to keep the heads moving and spindle turning, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal, so some big drives consume less power than some small ones. Another limit is their Windoze driver, which may have some size-related flaw. Chances are, they pirated it. The Linux driver won't have he same size flaws, though it might be incompatable with some non-standard idiosyncracy of a particular chipset. Another limit is interaction with the motherboard chipset or boot process. For example, there are ways to support more than one eSata drive in an enclosure on a single eSata cable, but only some motherboards support this. The "manufacturer" may not know what they are doing, a common problem with "Happy Family Mixed Vegetable Brand" Chinese electronics, manufactured in the kitchen of some Kowloon restaurant after the food customers leave. They may have made some enclosures from bits and pieces for sale in the Shim Shui Po electronics street market, tried them with four or five drives, and the enclosure did not work with a 500GB drive, for some reason. They assumed that it was the size that broke it, rather than the power or data rate or some other idiosyncracy. The name brand companies don't know much more, but at least you can give them bad reviews and warn others. All that said, even name-brand equipment made in China often has manufacturing flaws or gray market components. The cheap stuff from no-name shops almost certainly does - indeed, the name-brand manufacturers may be selling their test failures this way, making more money while damaging the reputation of the no-name competition. I would not trust a no-name enclosure with any valuable data. Sometimes cheap equals garbage, and you take a big risk buying this stuff. Spend money, learn from mistakes, check the reviews before you buy next time. A great place to buy stuff is Newegg. Most items they sell have customer reviews, and many of their customers run Linux. Before I buy something like a drive enclosure, I check the Newegg reviews, even if I (rarely) end up buying it someplace else. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
