If you have an old computer, it might not recognize a 500 gig drive. Has it been formatted and partitioned?

You said in the first post that you had two problems. Sorry but you really have one massive problem and that is the whole computer. You can buy new ones these days for $350-450 bux.

Please get your data to two other sources (otherwise known as backing up) and get a new computer, otherwise you are going to lose all your saved files, forever.

Oops, I for got to mention to partition it first. I don't think he should have a problem with a 500 gig drive.

Windows should recognise the drive even if the bios cannot
pretty sure Windows 2000 Server can deal with volumes that size, as long as they are not the boot volume

one thing about usb drivers, power
IF the enclosure is not externally powered, and relies on usb power
you can get all sorts of states of not working, simply because the disk doesn't get enough power.... especially if the USB ports have multiple devices attached to it

so if the enclosure uses one usb cable for data, and another one for power
you'll need to make sure they are both attached to a seperate USB controller

note, having 2 ports on the pc, does not mean they are both on seperate controller, they just might be 1 controller, with an internal hub
ideally , get yourself one of those usb power thingies for charging ipods in the mains
or at least plug the 2 cables one in the front usb ports of the pc, one in the back, that way you have a better chance they are on seperate controllers

Slodave,
Just found that out after posting the question. I thought I need to see it first before I can format it. Took me all night long to format it.

Thanks guys.

Unrelated question (although this thread got me thinking about it):

Why on earth are SCSI drives (and controllers) still so god-awful expensive today, especially compared to their IDE counterparts?

Reason I bring it up is for years I ran a small (4GB) SCSI drive on my Linux box to hold the operating system, swap file and other "system critical" stuff because it's faster & more stable. Never, ever had a problem. Not even once. Possible that SCSI drives are inherently better?

- made in smaller numbers
- probably more error correction, higher MTBF, made for high end application
- more everything
- 5 years warranty

i always found SCSI to be better then IDE, i've yet to do any decent benchmarking of SATA vs SCSI , but i'm sure they will still be better on most counts

for my desktop pc these days i'm ok with sata, i used to run scsi all round
these days i don't really do systems installs anymore, but if i would, i'de be damned to install a server without scsi... it's Sata and sata raid, just ain't server grade material

That's one of the reasons that I prefer Firewire. I carry a bunch of 2.5 drives with my laptop, can power and run daisy chained as many as I want off a single port.

If the same drives were in a USB enclosure I'd need to use 2 ports to juice just one.

Also Firewire is peer to peer, different devices, (video cameras and DVD recorders) can be plugged into each other and communicate without the need for a PC.

USB is host dependent, USB by nature taxes the processor.

WD Caviar® SE16
500 GB,
3 Gb/s,
16 MB Cache,
7200 RPM
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 3 Gb/s (Max)
Transfer Rate (Buffer To Disk) 972 Mbits/s (Max) (1 Mbit =125,000 bytes)
Operating Shock (Read) 65G, 2 ms
Non-operating Shock 350G, 2 ms







WD RE2
500 GB,
1.2 million hours MTBF,
16 MB Cache,
7200 RPM
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)
Start/Stop Cycles 50,000 minimum
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 3 Gb/s (Max)
Transfer Rate (Buffer To Disk) 85 MB/s (Sustained) (MB=1000×1024 (1,024,000) bytes)
Operating Shock (Read) 65G, 2 ms
Non-operating Shock 250G, 2 ms

notice how these are both WDC,listed as the high performance model in their class
SCSI = Enterprise class, SATA ain't

notice how they do not list MTBF for SATA

technically the SATA disk 2 buffer speed is higher, but i suspect that's just a peak number, and it probably can only sustain a lower amount then the SCSI disk does, and the SCSI disk in turns probably can peak higher...

You just answered yourself. I still have several small and old servers with those tiny HD too to hose web servers and it is still running, even though slow.