Are there certain external Hard Drive cases that aren't compatible with Mac

I have a new 160gb Hitachi hard drive and connected it to a Vantec NexStar usb 2.0 hard drive case (borrowed from a friend).
Disk Utility sees the external disk...however, whenever I try to Erase or Partition, the Disk Utility hangs. In Activity Monitor, it shows up as "not responding". I even left it over night to see if it recovers itself but no luck. I've tried the MacOS Extended (journaled), MacOS Extended, and MS-DOS types.
I'm wondering if this case is incompatible with Macs? I would prefer a case that has firewire though...so I might just buy a new case to try?
Has anyone run into something similiar?
Thanks!

Thanks for the idea...not sure why I didn't try that.
My new iMac recognized the drive immediately and asked if I wanted to initialize it. Took about 2 minutes. When I connected it to my MBP, it saw it right away...
I'm still not sure why the MBP couldn't initialize the drive when I tried...
Oh well, important thing is..it's working now..and I've backed up my iTunes and iPhoto libraries.
Thanks again!

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