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Can somebody explain why I cannot use an external hard drive with either my MMD G4 or PowerBook 15-inch , both running OS 10.3.5?
Here's the problem:
I have purchased ATA internal hard drives from Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor. They work fine when installed internally. However, when I convert them to an external HD using a third-party HD case/enclosure with USB 2.0 I get nothing but headaches.
Using the drives in their external enclosures results in freezes when attempting to load or transfer big or multiple files. After a minute or two the drives simply freeze and eventually freeze my entire OS, forcing me to do a forced shutdown and reboot. It's as if they are consuming all my processing power.
I've completely repaired, erased and reformatted these drives (including partioning them) using Disk Utility but that doesn't fix the problem. I've tried to rebuild the drives using Disk Warrior but, again, everything freezes early in the rebuild process. As a result, Disk Warrior becomes a spinning beach ball and I'm forced to force shutdown.
The problem is not related to a specific drive because I've used different manufacturers, and different sized drives. The HD enclosures are also by different manufacturers, but the problem is exactly the same for all.
This is also not unique to OS 10.3.5, I've experienced this probem beginning with 10.3.1 or so.
Lastly, when I use an "all-in-one" external hard drive USB 2.0 from Iomega (everything was from Iomega and not parceled together like these other external HDs) it works fine. So, is the problem in using a hard drive from a company like Seagate or Maxtor in somebody else's external HD case/enclosure? Seems unlikely since everything is supposed to be Mac-compatible.
I've been unable to find an authoritative discussion on this problem and would appreciate hearing from others about fixes, or possible explanations why this is happening.
Thanks!