Formatting External Hard Drive

ICEx21

ICEx21

ICEx21

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Joined
27 Apr 2007
Posts
2,162
Location
Edinburgh
Alright people, after getting some advice from members in here I recently purchased an ICY Box and 500gig Seagate Barracuda drive for backup purposes. Now the problem I'm getting is for some reason the system won't recognise the hard drive and I think I may need to format it. I use windows vista and everytime I go in to the bit where I'm supposed to have an option to format it nothing appears.
It just says unrecognised drive or something along those lines (at work so cant check the exact error message).
Is this a problem that any of you have experianced?
 
Using USB? If so then take it out the enclosure and connect it via SATA/IDE and format it first, if it's eSATA that shouldn't make a difference but try it anyway.
 
The reason I got the drive was because it would be a major hassle trying to get to the SATA ports in my case as my graphics card is just above them and the ide port. Is it possible to format it on a different computer and do it that way?
 
Don't think I initiliased the disk so I'll check that asap as soon as I get home.
I'm sure it was so much easier last time when I did this to my internal drive.
 
should be the same procedure, which icy box did you get?

if it's not esata, you're hampering the performance big time

get an icybox 390, they're £20 and have usb2&esata, total bargain
 
not the 390 !

you can get the bracket for £5-7 on the bay, which has the external power lead, so you don't need a power brick for your icybox then, very handy

they seem hard to find on online shops :(, not found one yet (luckily, one came with my gigabyte motherboard)
 
whats the difference between esata and just a normal sata enclosure?

//edit

nvm just read up on it and seems esata is just a USB like thing...

in real terms what speed difference is there between a enclosure with a SATA HD in it plugged into a PC by USB as opposed to plugged in by eSATA?
 
Last edited:
A2Z said:
whats the difference between esata and just a normal sata enclosure?

//edit

nvm just read up on it and seems esata is just a USB like thing...

in real terms what speed difference is there between a enclosure with a SATA HD in it plugged into a PC by USB as opposed to plugged in by eSATA?
Click to expand...

About 75MB+/Sec over 30MB+/Sec (depending on HDD ofcoarse). :)
 
eSATA isn't like USB, it's SATA with different connections for external use. Speeds are the same as internal SATA. The sustained speed of USB2 is about 30MB/s in comparison, Firewire is quite a bit faster than that but still slower than SATA.
 
Hey peepz thanks for the previous help but I've just managed to try out your suggestions now and for some reason it still won't display.

screwydisk.jpg


screwydisk2.jpg



Thats what happens when I try and click on it. Anyone got any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
 
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