lilrush wrote:
Yes that one. Oddly enough, this is the third brand of 3.0 enclosure I have attempted. I forgot to mention this drive is taken from a WD MyBook. Could it be that this drive is linked to the usb sata bridge that was in the My book, thereby preventing it from working in an enclosure?
Also, system report shows nothing attached to usb.
I also tried plugging it into a PC. On PC, disk manager shows the drive, but refuses access to the contents.
There shouldn't be anything unusual about the drive that it shouldn't work with any USB enclosure picked at random. They use the same drives internally that they sell as bare drives. But shouldn't isn't the same as won't.
Have you tried plugging it into your Mac without the drive and seeing if it shows up in System Report? I can do that with my Patriot Gauntlet 2 enclosure, and it shows up (twice strangely enough) as "ATECH FLASH TECHNOLOGY" product ID 0x6518. It certainly sounds like your enclosure isn't communicating properly. Spinning up is usually a function of providing power to the drive, and it doesn't even need to be connected to USB to do that - just the power supply. I've got a variety of older 3.5" external drives, including a Seagate 500 GB IDE drive in a generic enclosure, as well as a couple of really old WD MyBooks. All of them will spin up if there's power.
In a previous job I worked with systems engineers whose job included going to events called "plug tests" where our product (a peripheral controller) was plugged with different to see if they "play nice" or simply don't work. If it worked we would publish a list of known compatible devices. If it didn't we would work on trying to make them compatible. There are combinations of USB controllers and peripherals that just won't work together. It sounds like it just doesn't want to work. The device manufacturers also tend to buy commodity controller chips, so there's a chance that the different enclosures you have might use the same chip.
