I just bought an el cheapo (coolmax HD-211, 2.5 inch external USB 2 to be exact) enclosure. The drive wouldn't spin up set to master. I could just barely connect with a jumper attached because of the position of LED lights on the enclosure's circuit board. Set to slave it would spin up and then nothing, and with it set to "cable select" it spins up and the Mac (12" powerbook with USB2 ports, OS X.4.7) gives me a message to the effect that I have a choice of formatting the drive or ignoring it (unfamiliar format or unable to mount or something like that).
My question, before I return the enclosure, is: is it normal to have to reformat a drive when used in an external enclosure after it's been formatted and used as an internal? I've used this drive for a while with OS X internally, and it works fine that way. I don't want to format it because I have a bunch of stuff on there already.
-TIA
if you just got it, and it's already giving you problems, it's not worth it to keep it. You will most likely either destroying it where you can't take it back, or you will keep having problems if you DO happen to get something rigged up
I wouldn't buy *too* cheap of an IDE to USB adapter (for external 2.5) as your performance will suffer (they might use old, or surplus low end Bridges) and they will break just out of warranty. I have a 1st Generation LaCie External FW/USB2.0 Laptop enclosure, which is about 2 years old, and I can feel the performance lag, as well as the thing is falling apart right now.
So it depends on how long you want to use it before having to buy a new one...