USB drive adapter size limit?

[HankB]

I have this drive sled: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KBNY5SO

I'm pretty happy with it but I note that it purports to support drives up to 6TB. The question is if this is likely to support bigger drives. It seems like it might have been produced when drives bigger than that were not common. I bought it in January of 2015 but it could have been a "mature" design at that point in time. Maybe they didn't have a bigger drive to test with when the product was introduced.

Has anyone here tried using a drive larger than spec'ed in one of these devices and found that it worked (or did not?)

I'm thinking of getting a large drive to use in a sled for backups. (I could also get one of those already packaged in an enclosure and they seem to go for less.) I'm wondering if I need to stick with a 6TB drive to use this sled. Going to an 8 or 10 would cost more and might also require a new sled or holder.

Thanks!

 

[EarthDog]

Not sure why a 'sled' (docking station?) would have a limit. Looks like a passive adapter...

As far as that 'sled' in particular, reach out to the maker to confirm...

 

[Nebulous]

I have that enclosure/sled. Largest drive I put in it for formatting was 3TB. No issues that I can recall.

 

[Alaric]

Mine did actually come with a capacity limit. I can't remember if it was 4 TB or 6 TB, but the Amazon page mentioned it. I'll see if I can find it.

Update: My bad. It has an 8 TB limit. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GAML7OK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[HankB]

Not sure why a 'sled' (docking station?) would have a limit. Looks like a passive adapter...

That was my thought too. And for that matter it takes the same number of bits to address 8TB as 6 so a 6TB limit makes no sense.

As far as that 'sled' in particular, reach out to the maker to confirm...

I can't even find it on their web site any more. I'm pretty sure they would just quote the published spec.

I did approach this a little differently and searched for "usb sata bridge drive size limit" and found https://superuser.com/questions/308492/is-there-a-size-limit-on-external-usb-hard-drives One of the answers states

you can see that there are several versions of the API. The oldest supports 21-bit block addresses (and a 1GB limit), a later version supports 32-bit LBAs (imposing the 2TB limit many cases have today), and the latest has a 64-bit LBA which will impose an 8ZB limit (that's 8 giga-terabytes!).

It seems that if it supports more than 2TB it may support any size external drive I'm likely to encounter in my lifetime. At some point in time I'll have to try an 8TB drive in the sled (but not before I can backup the contents somewhere else. )

 

[SamirD]

I've been using external enclosures since the IDE days. There have been limits along the way, but only 2 from what I recall--128gb and 2tb. Anything above 2-3tb can address enough bits for whatever is currently the largest (14gb?)