Most of us remember when external HDDs could be had cheaper than similar bare drives, had this reason to shuck drives, or had a drive failure so had 3.5" USB external HDD cases left over.

Have you found any limitations in reusing the cases with new drives, especially supporting higher capacity HDDs?

I don’t recall all the cases I have but thinking Hitachi XL, or Seagate GoFlex/Expansion/Backup Plus Hub, cases that came with around 2TB to 4TB HDDs in them originally.

I did some research and it may depend on whether they use 32bit LBA or 64bit addressing, implying that cases from 2TB or smaller products may not support over 2TB:

https://superuser.com/questions/308492/is-there-a-size-limit-on-external-usb-hard-drives

Is there a way to determine this, a list, or do I need to get the chip ID of one of the chips and can look it up from that or is it also firmware related?

I have also seen reports that some cases only address 4TB worth of a larger drive’s capacity which leaves me wondering why, how can they address more than 2TB but not more than 4TB. I lost the links to some of those but here is one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/bwwqkl/comment/eq0znyx/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I’m hoping for replies from people who have faced a capacity limitation when reusing a USB enclosure, details of that and especially if it was one of the models I mentioned above.

I’m aware of the encryption issue with WD Mybooks but never bought any of those for that reason.