Question hard drive enclosures with a capacity limit???

[dj3642a]

i have been looking into getting an external hard drive enclosure for my 4 TB drive.. it is a sata 3 3.5 drive.. maybe i have missed seeing this before for an enclosure.. but when reading specs on some of them .. i am seeing things like 3 TB or 4TB limit.. ???what am i not understanding on this??.. if the hard drive itself is a 3.5 sata hard drive.. why would there be a capacity limit to the enclosure.. as far as i know whether its 1TB or 6TB.. the size of the drives are all the same. as long at it fits in the enclosure.. what difference does the capacity make?? now i can maybe understand that if its a DOCKING station. but this is strictly the single enclosure?? what am i not understanding?

 

[evermorex76]

It generally only means that they didn't test with any drives larger than that, so they're simply not going to guarantee that you won't have any issues with larger sizes because they can limit their support costs if you call in because your 24TB drive doesn't work and they can't be held liable. Same thing happens with PCs and laptops, where the manufacturer says it supports something like up to 4TB drives. In both cases it's often because there simply were no consumer devices available at the time they designed it that exceeded those capacities, so they COULDN'T test anything larger.

It is POSSIBLE for a really bad controller chip or firmware to be designed that can't address physical space beyond a certain point, based on the number of addressing bits, but that would usually only be encountered with really really old ones at this point because there's no cost savings to the manufacturer, and rather it would be a generational thing, like the MBR addressing limit versus GPT.