Hi,
I just bought a big fat 300GB Mactor SATA HD which I installed in my Windows XP Professional desktop computer to act as my D: drive (I already had a 74GB SATA Raptor as my boot drive). I also have an old 120GB IDE drive, an IBM Deskstar 120GXP, which I want to set up in an external enclosure. The other two drives work perfectly, but the external drive seems to have a split personality. I bought a USB 2.0 enclosure for it, and when I plug the IBM drive's USB cable in my computer senses the new device... for a few seconds, and then it all of a sudden disconnects... for a few seconds, then it gets sensed again... for a few seconds... etc.

Obviously, this isn't useful to me. What is going on here?

I've set the jumpers so that they are on Master (16 heads), and I've been more successful plugging the external drive into another laptop (also running XP) where it doesn't play the in-and-out game. Any suggestions?

I can't think of any reason for this off the top of my head other than a USB driver compatibility issue. Could it maybe be something to do with it being a USB 2.0 device plugged into a USB 1.1 port or is there some setting to adjust the speed / protocol that you can fiddle with?

You might want to try putting your Deskstar inside the PC and check that it still runs reliably there - then at least you know it's definitely a problem with it running outside the PC. Then you could put your 300Gb Maxtor in the enclosure and see if that's more reliable.

Hope that helps

Thanks for your reply, DJNafey.

I've managed to successfully use the Deskstar HD inside my machine - it works with no problems whatsoever. And I really wish I could use my 300GB drive in the external case, but I can't. It's a SATA drive and my external case is incompatible.

Is the only reasonable consideration left to me that the case itself is faulty?

Has anyone else had problems with a 3.5" Bytecc ME-740U2 aluminum external enclosure???