Gericom 250Gb External Hard Drive At Aldi [CLOSED]

weesax

From 12th May at Aldi as part of weekly offers, 250 Gig USB for 100 notes. Looks reasonable buy
http://uk.aldi.com

shrek101

These are a good price I been after one of these since Ebuyer let me down at Christmas, bunch of *^**^. Just checked on Ebuyer site and they are more and don't have the built-in card reader plus you don't get the aggravation should out happen.

martint123

Question: - is the 250gb supported ok on all XP systems?. I ask because 250gb IDE drives aren't supported on any of my three systems - worse, on the newest, it seems to be supported, but starts overwriting data when going beyond XXXgb (istr 137gb??)

BritBrat

Should be OK on XP, so long as you have SP1 or SP2 updates.

That's assuming your BIOS supports it too, check with MOBO site and see if there is a updated BIOS or if yours already supports the larger hard drives.

Nelly.t

I would have thought it would be ok. The bios I am not so sure about tbh, as you are plugging it in via usb then as long as your usb is usb2 then I think it should be ok. I thought the bios problems were for if you were to mount a drive of this size internally on an ata or sata cable.

Further comments welcome to put me right.

Nelly

martint123

Yes, I thought the BIOS would be out of it because I guess it will be driven by an operating system device driver rather than the BIOS.
Cheers.

Bubba_Shaboo

I'm definitely no techie so can't comment from that point of view but I have a Belkin external enclosure which connects via USB 2.0 which I am currently using to run an old 20GB HD but when I bought it there was definitely a warning on the box about some form of 137GB limit, I'll see if I can dig the box out from the spare room in the morning.

Bubba

shrek101

Well you could always partition it, if pc wont read above 137gb limit.

bakerrev

May be a daft question - but do these drives require a power adaptor or do they take power from the USB (which I doubt). Couldn't find this one on the Gericom site.

bleugh

all 3.5" drives will require an external adaptor, they pull waaaaaaay to much power for USB to supply.

chances are these drives have everything needed in the box, most i've seen just have a mains input no the back either in the form of a 'kettle lead' IEC input or one of the non earthed 'figure of 8' connectors, like used on PS2 and xbox

Ripperoo

martint123 wrote:

Question: - is the 250gb supported ok on all XP systems?

Dunno who makes the HDD within the "Gericom" enclosure, but a quick look on "Google" turned up THIS on the "Seagate" site.

Basically:

Seagate_Site wrote:

Windows XP manufactured prior to August 2002 has a native limitation of 137GB supporting ATA interface disc drives. In this configuration WinXP will not create partitions greater than 137GB until after the Service Pack is installed and registry bit EnableBigLBA is set to 1.

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