With Tiger, this seemed to be caused by an iMate and its driver (OK, that *was* officially incompatible, but worked for a trackball), with Leopard I did not test systematically.

Annoying.

Thanks for the info! I’ll be sure not to buy Cosmos HC-3502H’s in the future. Any problem with any other enclosures by Cosmos? I’ve actually never heard that brand… which backs up another train of thought behind this problem - don’t by the cheaper/cheapest (which is what I usually do). This must be another cheap-o with the poorer quality chipset.

FYI… I recently bought the NewerTech Mini Stack V2, similar to the HC-3502H. Although it worked fine for about 2-3 weeks, it suddenly died 2 days ago. It was not cheap, and certainly not the cheapest, and still had a problem (although not the same one related to this thread). Called NewerTech who told me to get an RMA # from the support section of the web site… yea, too bad that doesn’t exist!!

Frustrated!

I tried unchecking the “put hardrive(s) to sleep” option…didn’t make any difference. Only thing that brings the drive back is a power cycle of the case.

There really is no comparison…

The Mediasonic enclosure lets you choose either RAID-0 (stripe) or RAID-1 (mirror). Given the cheap price (and falling daily) of HDDs these days, there’s no excuse not to go with a RAID-1 configuration for extra security for your external drives, but in some situations, RAID-0 is fine as well.

Remember the golden rule, backup, backup, backup!

Thanks for the info! Good to know I’m not the only one. I think you’re definitely correct about buy cheaper enclosures.

If you don’t want to give up yet, you could look in Console to see if it’s giving you any strange messages when the drive is plugged in. That may help determine what’s needed to get it back up.

One word of caution about those big Lacie drives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m quite sure they have 2 individual drives inside (at least they used to).

They are using a proprietary hardware RAID to make both drives look like 1. This means, when 1 drive dies or goes bad, the other drive goes down also and you loose everything. And because it’s a hardware RAID, with half the data on one drive, and half on the other, it’s almost impossible to do data recovery (MAYBE Drive Savers could).

In summary, having an external drive with 2 drives inside doubles the chance of the external drive dying when compared to an external drive with 1 drive inside. And it’s harder to recover the data if/when it does die. You may be fine, but i’d be sure to back it up daily.

I’m going to google the Mediasonic HUR1-SU2FWB now, thanks for the tip!

Brian

I used to have to turn it off then back on, and it would ‘wake up’.

It’s been plugged in to my late-2007 24″ iMac for the last 6 months or so, but in stealth mode :)

Since it’s a pain to have to keep turning it on and off I haven’t been using it at all.

I think now that it’s unplugged I will just retire this enclosure and chalk it up as a lesson learned and stay away from the cheap enclosures. USB is a terrible interface for HDDs anyways. I’m going to grab another FW800 case and call it a day. For me, it’s just not worth the hassle and I don’t think a solution is to be found anywhere. :(

My 1TB LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ (via FW800) has been wonderful, but it’s just about full with less than 30gb remaining. Highly recommended.

I’ve been looking around for a new enclosure for some of my existing drives and I think I’ve found one that looks promising:

Mediasonic HUR1-SU2FWB on which I’ve read a positive review and they can be had for a reasonable price on eBay.

Good luck!

do you happen to know the brand/model of the enclosures that couldn’t sleep properly?

do you know if they had the same problem with restarts?

was this in 10.5 or 10.4?

thanks!
brian

Nice website by the way, just found it by ‘accident’ (you wrote the name in a TUAW comment, I googled).