Slashdot Mirror
Firewire and Linux?
aozilla asks: "I was just at Pricewatch, and I noticed that 80 gig firewire drives are available for only $200. My good old IBM Deskstar just crashed, so I'm in the market for a new hard drive, and I'd love to go with Firewire. External, hot-swappable and the ability to have more than 2 devices without significant slowdown are the main features I'd like on top of what I get from my IDE drives. I'd like to hear from those who have experience running firewire on Linux. How good is the driver support? Is hot-swappability really supported (just umount and unplug, plug and mount)? Are there any recommendations for PCI Firewire cards for Linux? How many drives can reasonably fit before power becomes an issue (I assume the less expensive drives obtain power from the port)? My main goals are capacity, cost, and convenience. Speed is not too much of an issue, and I'm more a fan of automated and explicit backups rather than RAID."
I have had alot of Luck with my firewire drive in linux. Of course I couldnt get it working as my boot drive but It gives me a whole lot of extra storage for mp3s, web sites, etc... I just wish I could get my camcorder to work....
FearLinux.com
I'm still trying to get my backpack hard drive to work with USB, rather than the CPU intensive parallel port.
The only problem you'll really run into is trying to make it a boot drive. I don't know of any BIOS's that have "FireWire" as a boot option.
However, you may be able to use a Linux Boot Disk with the FireWire driver on it... it would take some work, but it may be possible.
Just a thought,
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
check out linux1394.sourceforge.net. lots of info about which cards have good linux drivers, and how good the drivers are, etc.
-sam
burn the computers. go back to the abacus.
I haven't tried the 80 gig drives but I use a 1 gig microdrive with a firewire dongle regularly on 2.4.something. It doesn't work great. While transferring a lot of files, the computer becomes quite unresponsive (it seems to spend a lot of the time in the kernel). Finishing up the last file often takes a very long time, all the while the computer often appears frozen. It does freeze occasionally (only when using firewire).
In addition, unmounting/remounting only works sometimes. Often I have to unload the modules and reload them. Based on my experience, I would say mass-storage on firewire on Linux isn't ready for prime-time yet. YMMV.
Just cause a FireWire drive is cheaper wouldn't make me believe that the drive is powered off of the FireWire bus. Most of the time when I have been looking at FireWire drives, if it is bus powered then that is a feature they highlight to the buyer. Generally the bus powered FireWire drives I've seen are the 2.5" portable drives.
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
I've never used a FireWire hard disk, but I am using an EPSON Expression1680 scanner that is connected over FireWire. This device is hot-swappable, you just disconnect it, reconnect it and it is still working. I would suspect that disks behave similar as long as they are unmounted.
Been using mine for a while and works great. I expect much work in 2.5 will be done for this.
Support Texas Troops use TXGoogle
(I assume the less expensive drives obtain power from the port)?
I thought all firewire devices got there power from the bus not an external plug.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'm wondering what kind of performance a Firewire drive would give compared to an ATA-100 7200 RPM hard drive. Faster? Slower? Where would the data bottleneck on the way to the CPU?
The SoundBlaster Audigy line, in addition to being fucking awesome sound cards, include FireWire on the card. I'm not sure if they work under Linux (I'm more of a server guy, I don't run Linux on a desktop box so I know little to nothing about audio drivers) IIRC however, there are only two or three companies making FireWire chipsets as the licensing fees are apparently pretty expensive, which greatly cuts down on the number of chipsets Linux has to support. I've personally never used my FireWire (even though I have it on my Athlon and iBook) but I'd love to get my hands on a few of these FireWire drives for the nasty anime DivX habit I have..
Darwin probably has the best Firewire support of any of the unix flavors out there./
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin
I love my external firewire writer, the only negative I have about it is that external drives have their own powersupply and cooling and combined with the noise of the drive, it gets quite LOUD.
Two things the linux 1394 driver doesn't mix well with right now: non-i386 architectures, and systems with multiple CPUs. Also the 1394 storage code is very immature. I'd wait a while before going with 1394 storage on linux.
FireWire devices can be powered off the bus, using 6 pin to 6 pin FireWire connectors, instead of the 4 pins. The extra 2 pins carry the power. However, only small 2.5" drives tend to be powered over this connection. It's useful for recharging batteries, such as the Apple iPod. But for anything you'll be using with a desktop you probably get a desktop power transformer with your FireWire drive.
7 ).
;-)
I personally feel most comfortable building my own FireWire drive by selecting a really good looking enclosure and using whatever drives I want. For example take a look at this site here in the UK, www.pc500.net who have the IceBox, available with drives as well if you'd rather not bugger about with it yourself (see http://www.pc500.net/~pc500/catbrowse.php?bid=112
Anyways, FireWire is a great thing for moving drives between different platforms, such as Mac & PC. However, there is a need for a single filing system which works easily across Linux, Mac, Windows, etc. This biggest problem is normally the Mac to be honest, it doesn't read others, and others can't read it, if you get what I mean.
(sorry for the plug to my work site
Firewire works fine for me on my PC, but I had some problems with my Tibook. Right now I am using a 40GB drive for backup purposes. I also have a 20GB 2.5inch notebook drive which is nice for taking with you and just plugging it in for data transfer. Unfortunately, the Sony ilinks don't provide power so you also need to use the USB cable to get power for it. Both USB and firewire (ilink) work fine with Linux, although there may be some 2.4.x kernels where it doesn't work. Have a look at http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/ for the latest information.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
If you want simple, stupid, not-so-cheap but CompUSA style mathematics makes it look that way, go get a USB hard drive.
Really.
I think firewire is cool as hell, but not for this application. It's got bandwidth galore, to move video data back and forth, but this doesn't translate to "bandwidth galore for storage". If you have a digital camcorder, I wholeheartedly recommend adding a pci 1384 card to your box. But it's not something that I think is well suited to hard drives.
Hot plugability is an issue? How many times will you actually use this? You don't sound like you're sharing it with 20 different pc's, for instance. And if you're an uptime freak, be careful plugging in the PCI card... it'll work, but I always power mine down first. If speed isn't an issue, what's wrong with IDE? Or even external scsi? A decent scsi card, and external drive are no more expensive than the 1384 drives I've seen. There are plenty of dumb/slow/external drive solutions, and in every case they're cheaper than firewire.
If you just want to use firewire, use it for what it's good at. Desktop video. You'll be happy, won't be wasting money, or posting stupid "Ask Slashdot" questions.
I think it is an interesting questions. Also for laptops, which are very restricted in their expandability.
Does anybody know if there are any Ethernet or Wireless Ethernet interfaces for Firewire (like the network interfaces that are available for USB).
I'm currently using a WD 30GB disk for backups using firewire. The drive is powered externally, i.e. using a wall-wart.
The firewire code is quite stable for disk drive access.
I'm seeing about 6MBytes/s block writes to the drive. Not exactly ata100 but it beats the heck out of a tape drive.
I haven't tried hot-plugging, but it's easy enough to get your drive recognized using rescan-scsi-bus.
So the bottom line is that you could very easily set-up an automated back-up system using firewire.
Absolute statements are never true
I have a near irational interest in getting a Ipod,
firewire is part of that, how does the ipod interact
with a firewire card and linux?
No linux no Ipod, but I am piqued.
"think of it as evolution in action"
I have one question for you, can you please point me to a web page with a USB hard drive that outperforms FireWire? Apple tax or not, FireWire kills USB 1.0 in performance AND reliability.
A serial bus used for products like mice and modems won't even touch the throughput on a FireWire drive. Try again!
-Pat
Generally the cheaper ones are powered from the wall, and not the firewire bus. The firewire drivers that are powered from the bus are also generally smaller and more expensive than their wall powered counterparts. We have a few of each where I work, most of them VST units and we love them. We've used them for all sorts of problems around here that keep us from taxing out network with obscene file transfers. I can't speak much for compatable with Linux, but on our Mac's and our PC's with Firewire cards they work wonderfuly.
In a row???
I got mine working on a stock linux 2.4 (Suse 7.0)
it's unusable. Can barely record 2 minutes
before the whole thing locks up.
This may be different with the latest drivers, but
I had not time yet to upgrade.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
performance? reliability? with usb? hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
While I hate IDE, and for good reasons, I have nothing against firewire, but SCSI has been designed
to do what the poster wanted, and has been available for more than 10 years.
It's too bad that the price gap between SCSI and IDE drives has widenned so much, because they are essentially the same drives with slightly different electronics.
Either way, I would still go with SCSI.
Can anyone comment on the state of USB hard drives in Linux? Under RedHat 7.2 I plugged in a Fat32 formatted USB external hard drive and rebooted, but nothing happened. This kind of thing needs to happen automatically...
It takes a little effort to get the Firewire stuff working, but it is definetly worth it!
domc
BTW, check out Cool Drives for inexpensive enclosure kits (USB & Firewire).
Are there any Firewire or USB Hard Drives that are of mobile rack format? I would like to have hot swappable storage, but not with an external box. Mobile rack would be nice.
For those who do not know what mobile rack is, its a simple drawer in your 5 1/2" bay in which you insert your SCSI/IDE drive. Its not hotswappable, but when your computer is turned off, you can take your HD simply by pulling the drawer.
The other problem I've seen with firewire drives is that the seem t o stop showing up after awhile. Popping the case, most drives are set as master. By setting them to cable select they show up again. You can then set them back as master and they seem to work. I've seen this only on MacOS9/10.1, FWIW.
I'll be glad when they come out with 'native' firewire drives. Those should really fly.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I've had very good success with my DV camcorder under Linux. I'm using Linux 2.4.6 with a program called dvgrab to actually capture the video. It couldn't work better. And best of all, dvgrab will split up the videos on the computer based on where you hit the record button on the tape. That way you don't have to manually split them up.
I used the 2.4.7 kernel and a 1394 harddrive (from ADS Tech) a few months back.
It worked fine except for the hotplugging. I could get that to work about half the time, and it seemed to be pickier than windows(drive powered up before plugging in for instance).
I've heard recent versions are much improved, but don't quote me on that.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Well regardless of what OS you are on, make sure that the external drive controller has the the Oxford 911 chip in it. It syncs the ata 66 and 100 (and I believe ata 133) to the 400 mbps that firewire claims to provide.
All of the video editors out there who tried to capture video to external firewire drives that existed before the Oxford 911 chip was released can recall the torture endured with all the dropped frames.
The older firewire drives are still roaming around out there. especially on ebay. Buyer beware.
1. The supplied cable is the "standard" 6 pin firewire... 6 pins to 6 pins.
2. If you have a Dell Inspirion 8x00 laptop for example, you need an extra cable to convert 6 pins to 4 pins (smaller connector) to fit in the laptop (had to buy it as an extra).
3. The transfer speed I got here (Dell inspiron 8000) was around 15-20MB/s read, and ~5-7MB/s write (pretty sustained)
on win2k pro.
4. It rocks for big dumb storage, but it sucks if you need fast access to your data, you'd be better off with a 48Gig drive with a 20gig partition with NTFS encryption on for most tasks, but then again, if you need the full 80 gig for some reason, it's the best choice for the money (and so much faster than crappy Usb 1.0). I formatted 2 partition (works from disk manager, doesn't need any extra software), 40 gig normal 40 gig with compression... NOW I have enough space.. and yes the hotswap feature works like a charm.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Yeah, that $0.50 per port license fee is really gonna break the bank. May I suggest looking under your couch cushions for spare change?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I have no idea how you got moderated as being insightful since USB 2.0 is slower than FireWire, FireWire is a more proven standard in terms of high-speed devices and the online benchmarks I've seen showed USB 2.0 as significantly slower. For what its worth, I was surprised anyone bothered benchmarking it; FireWire is fast ...
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I've seen firewire kits on the market, and I have heard they work pretty well. This way, you can buy a cheap firewire PCI card, then buy a good, large IDE drive and a firewire kit, and then you have a much cheaper firewire drive with much more storage capabilities. These kits are pretty inexpensive and all you have to do is hook them up, plug in the adapter, and you're up.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
I'll grant that Firewire will kill full-speed USB 1.1 any day, but USB 2.0 brings the performance gap way down. 2.0 is specced for 480Mb/s burst, which is way more than 1.1 at 12Mb/s.
I think USB 2.0 is a great way to go for external storage, where you'll have random accesses and bursty data transfers. Firewire / 1394 is better for streamed data (video) and will remain so for the forseeable future.
Is it possible right now to use an external 1394 CD-RW with Linux and cdrecord? IIRC, the cdrecord docs say it will send SCSI commands over FireWire, but the FireWire config options in the kernel don't have SCSI emulation support like the IDE config. Plus, my CD-RW is an IDE drive in an FW case (as are most other drives). How can this be accomplished?
I recently upgraded to a 60GB Quantum Fireball. I bought the Maxtor Ultra/100 PCI card (made by Promise). What I found was that the integrated controllers on most motherboards are using the CPU more and more for their operations...The processor hit in reverting to the integrated IDE controller is signifigant enough to notice even on a 1GHz system. I don't have benchmarks, but you might try one of these controllers before you switch to Firewire.
Maybe you've never heard of an old technology called SCSI (yeah, you IDE kids even know what it stands for?) but it's worked with Linux and even better OSes (*BSD, solaris, irix, etc) even longer than IDE has.
You say you want "External, hot-swappable and the ability to have more than 2 devices without significant slowdown are the main features I'd like on top of what I get from my IDE drives.", well SCSI has had all of that for 15 years. Plus, it is faster than firewire, more time-tested, and there are more people making parts that work with SCSI than firewire.
Maybe you should check it out. Just because you saw an ad for Firewire in Windows magazine doesn't mean it beats the best interface that has ever been -- SCSI.
jason
I don't know what kind of mac you're using, but any mac recent enough to ship with firewire will read Win partitions, There is no reason why you can't use vfat and have everything read it. I don't know which release works, but Mac System 8.5+ ought to do it.
At the moment (unfortunately) there is no such thing as a native 1394/Firewire harddrive. All available 1394 drives are ATA = IDE drives going through an adapter (several adapters are available).
That means these drives are performance limited by the ATA interface. The best performance I've seen reported is about 90% of what the drive could do directly plugged in to an IDE cable.
I have found no analysis of how the other Firewire characteristics of these adapted drives hold up (low cpu usage, numerous drives, how robust when hot swapping).
There are native firewire CDRWs (Sony makes one I think) and firewire tape backup systems. But not hard drives. Seagate has been threatening to make one for a year or so, but where's the bits?
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
Look for enclosures and adaptors based on this chipset. It's ATA side is ATA66(udma4?). Benchmarks I've seen show performance through this chipset to be on par with an ATA drive going through an ATA interface. eg. the drive is the bottleneck again.
Whoever said even usb1.0 drives are faster than firewire, even the older generation, is smoking somthing. What I've seen of usb1.0 shows it equates to 1MB/s.
What makes you think it doesn't work good for Harddrive??? Depending on the application, harddrives may need more bandwidth than video. Firewire provides 400 Mbits/second which is 50MBytes/second... 1/2 of the bandwidth of IDE - DMA/100 all on a external Serial Line. Not what I would call "bandwidth galore"
Going to USB (1.0) would be insane... only 12Mbits/sec, or 1.5 MBytes/second... That's MAX not assuming any other activity, etc on the bus.
Good... suggest something that could physically damage someone's system....
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
You don't explain why you think Firewire is bad for storage. I don't understand your comment that it has bandwidth galore for DV but not for storage. Bandwidth is bandwidth. Fireware, SCSI, ATA and USB 2 all provide more bandwidth than a single drive than use anyway, if I'm not mistaken.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Wow. What a tirade.
FireWire is *fantastic* for storage. It's much like scsi.
Why do you not think it's suitable for hard drives?
What's 'not suitable' about cheap, easy to use, hot pluggable 80 gig drives you can just stack up for extra storage on your desk at work? or at home?
Oh. You mean desktops.
Not good for desktops. But for laptops. Or portable storage.
You've never traded DivX with others? Moved huge numbers of mp3? CD just doesn't cut it.. but a firewire drive.. ahh.. that's the ticket.
And some idiot even MODed you up as 'Interesting'.
- Stability: 1394 storage is pretty stable when you only have one drive on the bus. Multiple drives may make things flaky, particularly when you have lots of IO going on and are using broken drivers.
- Speed: performance isn't bad with one drive, but multiple drives are slow. This is mainly due to the use of serialized IO; nonserialized IO is faster but makes things very unstable.
- Hotplug: Hotplugging really isn't there yet. You may have to connect and disconnect a device a few times for the 1394 code to recognize it. Once you connect it successfully, you have to run rescan-scsi-bus.sh to get it to show up in
/proc/scsi/scsi. Then you can mount it. Unplugging is slightly less hassle: umount, disconnect the device, and run rescan-scsi-bus.sh. The dynamic nature of the bus makes it hard to have a decent fstab with multiple drives; you may want to use volume labels to get around this problem.
- Power: all of the units I've seen are self-powered, not bus-powered, so the power isn't a problem.
- Cards: most OHCI cards should work with no hassles. I bought the cheapest (~$35) 1394 cards I could find on buy.com and they work just fine (they have a VIA chipset).
My best advice would be to surf over to the Linux1394 project website and read the docs over there; you'll probably want to get their drivers anyway, instead of using what's in the stock kernel.My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
Are there any recommendations for PCI Firewire cards for Linux?
I use the SIIG's 1394 DV-Cam Kit. It's pretty cheap (I paid around US$30 at Fry's), and it comes with both card and the cable.
I don't know how fast it would be for mass storage though, but it works fine for my DV camera.
> A serial bus used for products like mice and modems won't even touch the throughput on a
> FireWire drive.
While I agree with your opinion, you have to be careful with that statement. Both busses are serial, and both can be used for "mice and modems". The fact that there are no 1394 mice has more to do with the (lack of) availability of ultra-cheap chipsets than with its poor suitability for that task. In fact, if anything, USB should be commended for incorporating a low-speed mode that can be bit banged by micros, while still allowing high-speed devices on the same bus. The fact that USB 1.x was 12Mb has more to do with it being designed for a price point, rather than with inherent problems in the USB protocol or topology. I like both USB and Firewire, they're both very elegant technologies that are helping us eliminate the mess that was before. Just because their respective corporate parents are squabbling doesn't mean we as consumers shouldn't love both.
Firewire Powered drives cost a good deal more than regular AC powered ones. The cost of the electronics to pull the power from the FW Bus drives the price up.
I've seen Bus powered drives that cost as much $120 more then their AC powered counterparts.
-> Capt Cosmic <-
quote: "CD writers outperform their FireWire equilvalents."
This statement is full of shit! The only thing I get consistant from a USB CD burner is a BUFFER underrun! Wow now I have 100 coasters!
When I use a Firewire CD burner I plug it in the computer mounts it I burn a CD. I plug in a USB cd burner... reboot... Start burning a CD and 2 time out of 3 I get an error!
Hmm USB sure rocks if you like coasters!
I think firewire is cool as hell, but not for this application. It's got bandwidth galore, to move video data back and forth, but this doesn't translate to "bandwidth galore for storage".
Why not? Are the seek times more? What are the practical problems with firewire vs. IDE?
Hot plugability is an issue? How many times will you actually use this?
Four times a day, Monday through Friday, at the very least. Sharing with 2 PCs... I'd also use it for backup purposes if it really worked well. Why bother with tape backups when I can spend $200 and back up 80 gigs?
If speed isn't an issue, what's wrong with IDE?
As I said, hot swappability, and the ability to add more than two devices without a significant speed detriment (and the ability to add more than 3 HDs at all, besides my CD-rom).
Another advantage is that I won't have to spend 2 hours installing the drives in my parents' computers when I give the old drives to them and buy new ones.
Or even external scsi? A decent scsi card, and external drive are no more expensive than the 1384 drives I've seen. There are plenty of dumb/slow/external drive solutions, and in every case they're cheaper than firewire.
My rough estimate would be $250x3 for 3 80 gig drives, plus $100 for the 1384 card. What hot swappable reasonably fast (no tape drives) solution do you know of for $850 for 240 gigs?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Right this second (stock kernel 2.4.14), it sucks. It locks up my machines every time I try to load SBP-2. However, going to the sourceforge 1394 code and getting an older version from 6/1/1 allows me to mount my drive and use it just fine.
The Kernel guys seem to be focusing on cameras rather than on good SBP-2 support.
Is hot-swappability really supported (just umount and unplug, plug and mount)?
No. it only creates /dev/sd* devices when you load the module initially. There is some way to cause the kernel to go rescan for SCSI devices, and this is purported to work, however I have never done it.
Are there any recommendations for PCI Firewire cards for Linux?
Make sure the card supplies external power. Some crappy board manufactures don't supply power to the bus in an effort to reduce cost. This is bad bad bad. Aside from that, they are all basically the same. I recommend the Maxtor host adapter.
How many drives can reasonably fit before power becomes an issue (I assume the less expensive drives obtain power from the port)?
Actually, the only drives that run exlusively off power from the port are the 2.5 inch drives which are more expensive. The 3.5" drives require too much power to be powered exclusively through the bus.
Best case: Firewire can supply 45 watts (from the spec). Those 2.5" drives use about 7 watts.
Realistic: Only FireWire on Macintoshes supplies any kind of decent wattage: about 30. FireWire PCI cards with external power connectors only supply about 18 watts.
So: 2 bus powered drives on a PC, 4 on a mac, with 6 being the theoretical maximum.
External powered drives basically use no bus power so there's no limit there.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
ieee1394 is ideal for connecting camcorders and digital cameras to a Linux system.
This link has an extensive list on ieee1394 interfaces and other hardware compatible with the Linux ieee1394 driver
Here's a link list to other 1394 and digital video related projects.
The same website hosts the dvgrab and Kino applications. dvgrab is a command line utility which downloads from a digital video camcorder. Kino is a small non linear digital video editor application, can download and upload movies from and to camcorders.
The ieee1394 drivers are still considered experimental. I have good results using the version in the 2.4.12 driver, but I can't really recommend the Linux ieee1394 drivers for anything critical. Please read the IEEE 1394 Driver for Linux Homepage.
When you dig down into the SBP-2 layer of IEEE-1394 you will find that it is SCSI. SCSI commands and responses are used for the mass storage device on IEEE-1394. The only thing that is different is the physical and low level signal transmission. So, at the software level (once you get above the lowest level packet sender/receiver) there is no difference from scsi.
:-) A 12% cost savings will win in the end.
At the physical level you get to trade a 50 or 68 pin connector and cable for a 6 or 4 pin connector and cable. The controller chips probably cost about the same in volume, maybe a couple of bucks different. A good SCSI cable (and don't mess with bad ones) is $50. A good firewire cable is $7.
There is your reason. A $300 disk is $350 with
SCSI and $308 with Firewire. (I added a dollar for the $0.50 license fee on the ports at each end of the cable.
Non-tangibles such as easy configuration, the ability to pile a dump truck load of disks on a single interface, and not becoming ensnared in a wriggling mass of cables are just nice bonuses.
(I have used SCSI for ages, but now prefer IEEE-1394 for my archival storage machines. I still use SCSI for my high reliability and high performance machines, but that is more a Linux driver issue than anything intrinsically IEEE-1394.)
I love how you state "I'm more a fan of automated and explicit backups rather than RAID"
RAID isn't for backups and shouldn't be thought of as such. its for performance and reliability. a RAIDed server can remain functional with a dead harddrive. A non-RAIDed one cannot. A RAIDed server can see a performance boost from the ability to read from whichever drive happens to be free. Backups should be done in any event, not instead of.
Of course, I assume you're talking about a desktop, in which RAID is only really nice for having a really large disk or for performance if you're a graphic artist
So for say 3 80 gig HDs for random access, what would be the performance of IDE vs. USB 2.0 vs. Firewire, assuming the same 5400 RPM IDE drive as the actual drive? This is pretty much the scenario I'm looking at, though I can only afford to replace my one IDE drive at the moment.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
That's supposed to be "In the grim future of Hello Kitty there is only war."
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
(and the ability to add more than 3 HDs at all, besides my CD-rom).
Actually, now that I think about it, that's probably one of the biggest issues. Right now I have 4 old hard drives laying around, just because it's not worth the trouble hooking them up for the 2-8 gigs I'll get out of them. Who knows that in 2 years I won't be saying the same thing about my 40 or 80 gig drives.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I've had an HP USB CD writer (8200 series) for about two years now, and have yet to actually produce a coaster (except when copying a CD that's terribly scratched or something like that). I've probably burnt about 100 CDs in the time that I've had it, and I don't recall the buffer ever even dipping below 100%. Granted, though, it can only burn at 4x, which isn't exactly fast when you've got several gigs of mp3s to burn off, but it's something that can run comfortably in the background. I imagine there are a lot of things that could be causing your buffer underruns. Maybe taxing the USB bus too much, trying to burn at a higher rate than is reliable, etc.
Steven N. Severinghaus
In other words, USB 2.0 is a hack.
:)
Suger coat as you like, but it's still a hack, mostly designed to gain attention as people see "400mbps vs 480mbps", "ohh, that one's faster!" - kind of like ATA100 is faster than Ultra2/LVD, right?
Did you know that the word facetious is one of the only words in the English language that uses all 5 vowels in alphabetical order?
If I can put words into NoMoreNicksLeft mouth... He isn't saying that Firewire is bad for storage, rather that it is, at the moment, overkill for this application and that USB is good enough, cheaper, and better supported under Linux. In the original question, aozilla specifically says that speed is not an issue, which is the only advantage I can see Firewire has over USB in this application.
// TODO: fix sig
It may be better than the parallel prot, but from using various CDRW's on a few laptops and a few desktops, I find them to be MUCH slower than IDE counterparts, and less friendly to the rest of system.
That's the price you pay for externalibilty. Or is it Externalness?
I can't speak for FireWire, but using Fibre Channel, which typically appears as a SCSI disk (sda, sdb and so on), it is a hassle to get new devices to appear when they are added. Usually the module for the Fibre Channel adapter needs to be rm'd and ins'd. This is obviously not an option when booting from the device. Adding insult to injury, the sd's can switch around as you add and subtract devices - sda can move to sdb. This is a real headache. Hope this helps.
I keep seeing all these fantastic speeds for ATA and SCSI, but I'm completely confused. Don't both of them use PCI, which is a 33 MHz bus? How, then, do they propose transferring data any faster than that? While I may not be a hardware expert, I know that you can't transfer data any faster than that.
answer: if you use a slowassed drive, your performance will suck, no matter the interface.
Anyone have any info on freebsd support for firewire drives and controllers? From what I have found it appears to be non-existant :(
I've been very happy with my Iomega ZIP-CD 650 USB CD burner attached to my laptop running RH7.1 (USB 1.1).
Granted it only burns at 4x, but in the past year I've burned several hundred CDs and CDRWs. Not one coaster. I've never had cdrecord report anything but 100% buffer full.
You might want to look at the write speed. When I was shopping for a USB CD burner 4x writes were pretty much the maximum. To the best of my knowledge cdrecord doesn't check for a drive speed limit.
I've been quite amazed at the stablility of USB devices in linux. I've got cameras and a scanner.
I and many of my co-workers have had various incarnations of USB and Firewire-connected IDE drives and had many failures (one for each of us so far.) Mine and others have been a software issue or an issue with the bridge, the drives worked fine when moved internally and reformatted...Something between the OS and the drive corrupted the filesystem bigtime. (This is under MacOS X and Win98SE, not Linux...so if it's an OS issue it might not be as much an issue on Linux...:)
My recommendation is to, instead, buy a $20US removable drive tray/rail system, I have 6 drives in trays of various sizes/makes and have *never* had a problem. (Note: no bus bridging involved.)
Or, at worst case, just make sure you make regular backups.
To extend the question, does anyone know any details about USB 2.0 under linux? I've been looking at Maxtor's personal storage products and they look pretty nice.
USB 2.0 ==> 480 Mbit vs 1394 ==> 400 Mbit
The choice seems clear to me. Am I missing something?
Sounds good to me. I've had zero problems with my 5400, considering the drive is mainly just there for mp3s, rpms, isos, backups, and when I shut the computer off at night, wiping out my half gig of ram. And once I get the firewire drives up and running I'll probably be making a server to stick in the closet or basement and not have to deal with the shutting down at night part anyway.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
FireWire might be "overkill" for certain things, but storage isn't one of them. USB drives are almost bad enough to make you long for a parallel port solution, and USB CD-Rs IME are coaster machines. (Linux support for USB stuff ain't that great either. It's unix, use SCSI.)
>> When you dig down into the SBP-2 layer of IEEE-1394 you will find that it is SCSI. SCSI commands and responses are used for the mass storage device on IEEE-1394. The only thing that is different is the physical and low level signal transmission. So, at the software level (once you get above the lowest level packet sender/receiver) there is no difference from scsi.
:-) A 12% cost savings will win in the end.
Hey - funny that.. you know, ATAPI, FibreChannel, and USB all use SCSI commands too?
>> At the physical level you get to trade a 50 or 68 pin connector and cable for a 6 or 4 pin connector and cable. The controller chips probably cost about the same in volume, maybe a couple of bucks different. A good SCSI cable (and don't mess with bad ones) is $50. A good firewire cable is $7.
You're also trading 100, 160, or 200 MegaBytes/s (ata-100,ultra-160,2 gig FC) for 50 MegaBytes/s.. And if minimizing the number of conductors is your goal, FC over copper only uses two LVPECL pairs..
>> There is your reason. A $300 disk is $350 with SCSI and $308 with Firewire. (I added a dollar for the $0.50 license fee on the ports at each end of the cable.
Since u160 scsi is almost three times as fast, with firewire, you get almost a 70% saving in usable bandwidth!
>> Non-tangibles such as easy configuration, the ability to pile a dump truck load of disks on a single interface, and not becoming ensnared in a wriggling mass of cables are just nice bonuses.
What a bonus! Not only is your bus markedly slower, it supports more devices, so you can take advantage of that absent bandwidth!
Honestly - I'm not trolling. (honest) - I'm trying to add perspective.. '1394 is nifty, and certainly better than USB, but, it is by no means a replacement for ATA, SCSI, or FC. Sure, It's cheaper, sure it uses cheaper cable.. but, you get a cheaper technology. Like dad always said, 'You get what you pay for.' Me? I'll pay the $42 extra for my U160 drives.
fnord.
I get buffer underruns whenever I try to write at 12x (IDE connection), I have to turn it down to 8x
Kinda klunky, to say the least...
Dabe
A friend of mine has a firewire drive and I plugged it into my sony vaio laptop. Wham! I had another 60gig. It was just as fast if not faster than my internal drive. I mounted it like it was a scsi disk and then I copied files back and forth to see the speed. WOW it was fast. I did not have any issues. The only thing I would suggest is that the firewire drive be SBP-2 compatable.
I was testing his drive since I looking to upgrade the internal drive in my laptop and move the current drive to a small firewire enclosure. That way I get multiple drives when I need them.
I am very impressed with the 1394 code so far in the linux kernel.
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
Well, USB 2.0 might be 400Mbit, but I thought it was a shared bus? Whereas firewire isn't shared? Plus, firewire devices have their own controller chips and don't make the CPU do any of the work...
It is surely an interesting discussion.... but is it in fact NEWS? I think not.
:)
Sometimes I wonder if the EdiTrolls(TM) actually preview their posts...
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Some bridges, specifically the Oxford 911 chip bridges, are a bit faster, but performance is not quite up to par with ATA-66.
Also, the Oxford 911 is fairly unreliable and dicky when used with Apple hardware (OS 9 and OS X both tested.) Something to keep in mind if you're running Linux/PPC.
--saint
He isn't saying that Firewire is bad for storage, rather that it is, at the moment, overkill for this application and that USB is good enough, cheaper, and better supported under Linux. In the original question, aozilla specifically says that speed is not an issue, which is the only advantage I can see Firewire has over USB in this application.
Makes me wish I had rephrased the question. I mentioned that speed is not a big issue to try to get rid of the "go with SCSI" crowd. USB 1.1 would be out of the question, however USB 2.0 is getting a good look now. I guess I must have missed the big USB 2.0 revolution, because every time I read "USB hard drive" I read "900Kb/sec transfer limit". I'm looking for something at least close to the speed and cost I'm getting now with IDE.
After reading the answers to my question (thank you very much everyone), I've pretty much decided that firewire would be preferable to yet another IDE (is it ATA) drive. I haven't yet looked into USB 2.0, but I'm guessing that decision is going to come down to which one would I rather have 2, 3 years down the road.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
my acer 4x cd writer plugged into my USB 1.1 port has yet to produce a coaster even though my machine is a p2-366 with 128 megs of ram and a slow ass notebook hdd.
Why have you moderated this message as "Troll", dear admin?
It seems you have got the crack pipe again, and again and again..
Again, dear admin?
What the hell is funny on this message?
Believe me, these scientists that say crack causes your brain to malfunction are right.
Please avoid the damn crack pipe.
I have a friend who is a videographer. He purchased two different cheap firewire drives from two different vendors. Both of them failed within a month... not a physical failure of the drive, but a logical failure (MacOS couldn't mount the drives any more, but just offered to initialize the drives). He lost many hours of work from some clips he was working on. Upon his request, I have since cracked open both drives, removed the EIDE drives, and installed them in his box as internal units.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
There is a very neat utility called "dvbackup" (dvbackup.sourceforge.net if I remember correctly) which allows you to backup up to 10gb per mini-DV tape. Very neat concept, with something like 3mb/second transfer rates, however I have not been able to get this to work at all. Recently there was a fix to make it work with 'NTSC' cameras so I guess before it would only work on PAL systems anyway. Anybody there who actually successfully backed up any data with dv backup?
Yes, but firewire burners typically are capable of greater speeds (USB1.1). USB 2.0 may fix this problem. Personaly, I like firewire since it allows be to hook up my DV Camera with little problems. One of my cameras has both a FW and USB port. The USB port has proved almost useless.
The Audigy has a modified 1394 chip i believe, SB1394 they call it, i dont know the actual difference, but i was told it runs faster than the standard 1394..
Anyone have more info on that?
Just a small note: ever since the 7500/8500/9500 model PowerMacs, all of Apple's computers have used the IEEE 1275 "Open Firmware" firmware architecture. Sun also uses this, branded as OpenBoot, and I believe IBM uses it in their POWER4 servers as well. It's not custom in the least.
It's always been a complete mystery to me why PC vendors didn't implement OpenBoot, since it's inexpensive,open, and provides many of the functions that you currently need to buy expensive hardware dongles to get on PCs.
(Preemptive note to moderators: realweasel.com really is a hardware site.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Its a good thing they are all self powered, I would never trust an external drive powered via the bus. Ive seen some terrible devices for USB being self powered that actually caused damage to Motherboards! Unfortunatly many manufacturers seem to skimp on the specs at times, resulting in m/b's or controllers not supplying enough power, or the reverse devices drawing too much.
:(
I had one USB FlashMem reader that came with a Richo Digital camera, that destroyed the usb ports on one M/B and actually destroyed another motherboard entirely!
Has anyone tried mounting the iPod in Linux? It should just work, eh?
Yeah!
Why benchmark USB 2.0??
FireWire is fast!
(can anybody else detect the stupidity in the above?)
Just so you know, my new favorite parts place newegg.com, has a very nice SoundBlaster Audigy OEM edition for $70. This will get you not only a very nice sound card, but a Firewire port as well.
If you're more in the mood for just a standard 1394 controller, they sell those for $55: "SIIG IEEE 1394 3-PORT PCI CARD - RETAIL" under the Controllers category.
I've ordered once every month or so from these guys for the past 8 months. They rock, especially on shipping time and cost!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
> This biggest problem is normally the Mac to be honest, it doesn't read others, and others can't read it, if you get what I mean.
Not true, at least not completely true. I've gotten my (dorky old) firewire drive to move between a Mac (G3 gray with addon orangmicro firewire, running MacOS 9) and a PC (vaio laptop, win 98). This was in mid 2000 so stuff has upgraded obviously.
If partitioned and formatted on Win 98, the disk has a DOS partition table (primary and logical partitions) and I put both FAT 16 and FAT 32 partitions on it. Came up just fine in MacOS, just like floppys and zips that are dos formatted. Although MacOS can't format one of the partitions to be HFS without...
If partitioned under MacOS, with Mac partition tables and HFS and/or HFS+ partitions, Windows treated it like it was from mars. unformatted.
Haven't tried under Mac OS X yet, could be busted. I got more gigs than I can use right now these days. Yuck, just stepped on another disk drive!
Marketing-driven companies end up over-marketing their products. Engineering-driven companies end up over-engineering
A decent (not top end) scsi card costs no more than the firewire card. Haven't priced drives in awhile, but external enclosures can be picked up cheap.
My biggest problem with using firewire for storage is that doing so consumes most/all the bandwidth that might be better used for digital video. It's like those fools who design cd-r drives for USB (the USB comment was sarcastic, sorry I didn't make it clear). Lord knows that I don't want buffer underruns because I typed and moved the mouse at the same time I was burning a disc. Storage (with the possible exception of 1.44 floppy drives) on USB is retarded. USB was meant so that I could connect my kb/mouse/joystick/little doodads all at the same time without any problems. And people misuse it.
I think the same thing is ocurring with firewire right now. A digital video camera, maybe a webcam (this would rock), video decks, etc... these are the things that firewire was meant for, and still what it's best used for. I don't think it should be wasted on anything else, unless you are 100% certain that you'll never mess with this stuff. I don't have the cash for a digicamcorder right now, but I sure won't rule out wanting to play with one in a year or two's time.
As for my comments on the ata133 story, I'll briefly summarize, since they are slightly relevant. You should invest in a decent network for your multiple PC's, if you haven't already. At that point, external is not such a big deal, and hot swappability less so. Build a cheap Fibre Channel over copper array. This will be the standard for corporations for years to come, and because of that we can get nice cheap toys as handmedowns. Give everyone on the network 10-20 gigs as a share on the server, and expand the array as necessary. This thing will take up to 128 devices without getting fancy, doesn't mean using expensive fibre cables, and the cheap hard drives will only get bigger. A 64bit controller can be had well under $50 on ebay, well under $100 on pricewatch. Uses cat5 stp. Cheap converters are available at http://master-www.cinonic.com:8080/. Hard drives as big as 60 gigs are available for under $100, well within your price range I think. Even smaller drives are useful, raided together into one large, fault tolerant, fast volume. IDE is dead as far as I'm concerned.
Not too bright are ya? If you're going to make inflammatory posts, at least support your opinions with evidence. Anything else is just wasting our time. Now go read a book on SCSI and give us some worthwhile info. Dumbass.
Why is this moderated to funny?
Ceci n'est pas un post
I think the next version may be only 800 Mb/s.
I don't know if you took it out of the case or not but if you did I would think the data was fine. Of course if you did you wouldn't get the drive replaced. Damn if you do, damn if you don't.
The journey is better then the end.
The former Device Bay consortium home page, "www.device-bay.com", now links to something called "Euro-Teen Sluts".
My buddy showed me an interesting demo comparing firewire devices vs ide devices. He has a cd burning tower with 6 ide burners and 6 firewire burners. The firewire burners are actually ide connected to adapters. He started a burn to all 6 ides and showed cpu usage near 95% (win2k).
Then he cancelled that and started another 6 cd burn to the firewire burners - cpu usage was 4%.
Apparently firewire like scsi use alot less cpu to do their job.
Would it be posible to use apple's new iPod from a
Linux Box? afer all it's only a Firewire hard drive with additional functions isn't it? That would be so cool!
You're out of your mind. Here's a concrete example of FireWire being far better for mass storage than USB -- ever wonder why you can't find any USB CD-RWs that transfer faster than 4x? That's right, because the USB bus can't handle anything faster. Try for higher bandwidth, get coasters. This problem simply does not exist with FireWire. At up to 50MB/s (that's *bytes*, not bits), it won't for a long, long time. The throughput of pretty much every USB 1.0 device is bandwidth-limited by the bus, save the doofy little serial interfaces. That's why USB 2.0 is out. But I don't think I heard you say anything about that...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Why?
Actually, I think they are an Idiotic American Journalist.
Excuse me moderator, please take a trip to Walmart and buy yourself a sense of humor
as seen on
It depends on the type of Vaio you have - some Vaios use an OHCI compliant Firewire controller that works with Linux.
Just yesterday I got a Pioneer external firewire DVD writer to work with Linux (kernel 2.4.14 with the latest ieee1394 drivers from CVS and cdrecord) on our Vaio PKG-600.
The audigy doesn't have a 1394, it has an SB1394 - it only provides 2 watts of power, ie below the spec for powered 1394
still, as a video capture it'll still work fine
Just a warning
Ever heard of sarcasm?
In 1987, 1995 and 1999, I went with SCSI. My boot drive is internal, and my backup drive is external, and normally turned off. This is important, as at least one drive failure mode I've experienced was power related. All powered on drives died in the event.
SCSI is faster than fire wire, and more mature. History has show SCSI to be upgradable over time. My 1987 system is still in production operation. I can still buy drives and other devices for it. I have a SCSI CD drives, CD burner, disk drives, scanner, and tape drive. Many of these items did not exist in 1987. SCSI has improved in speed over the years, and the high end server market has kept SCSI alive and well. For me, extending the life of the original system allowed me to expand it in hardware and software, improving cost performance.
Fire wire may be twice as fast as IDE, but my experience is that SCSI is more like four times faster. For example, under Linux, I get 2-5 MB/sec with IDE and 11-25 MB/sec with SCSI.
You can spend an extra few hundred dollars on your system and have a slightly faster CPU. You can spend less on your I/O system and quadruple the speed. Given today's bloatware, you tend to be waiting for I/O rather than CPU cycles. So, by and large, the place to spend your money for performance is I/O. And if you upgrade your system, chances are, you'll be able to move your SCSI hardware forward, as I have done.
-- Stephen.
Macs have FOR MORE THAN A DECADE read DOS formatted disks. My macs can read FAT formatted zip disks. [Luckily, I had SCSI in my pc, so I didn't have to wait for the IDE Zip drives].
n dex.html
I've now had one of the 80G Maxtor drives since about April/May, and it's worked fine for me, moving files between a G3 portable, G4 desktop, win98 desktop, win2k desktop, and a winME desktop.
On the windows side, you have to go down to the lower right corner, and tell it to unmount the disk before you pull it. With the Mac, you just handle it as you would normally unmount a disk (drag to the trash).
Now, as for this 'doesn't read others' crap, let's look at the whole details -- As HFS uses two forks (data, resource), if you attempt to write a Mac file in anything other than 'raw data' mode, it'll create a directory 'resourcefolder' or something of that sort, and store the resource fork there. If you then use a non-mac to move the file, you'll lose the resource fork. This isn't an issue for many types of data files, as may have comments (like where a JPEG was downloaded from), or some minor save state information (BBEdit save state). This is an issue for applications, however. If you're going to need to move files around on the non-mac system, it's best to save them as some sort of an archive, or write 'em out to MacBinary.
There is, however, one additional issue. UNIX, DOS and Mac all use different line endings on text files. Normally, files are transfered between different systems using 'FTP', and you'd just force it to acsii mode to deal with this problem. If you're writing to a local disk, you'll have to know what line endings the recipient will need. WordPad (PC) or BBEdit (Mac) will handle foreign line endings. Not being a Linux user, I don't know if there are editors that handle this issue. [there's 'dos2unix' and the like, or you can just do some simple subsitutions on the file].
Macs for a damned long time even shipped with 'MacLink', a program which would let you convert different DOS/Mac/whatever files from different applications, so that you could open a Word5DOS file in WP3.5Mac without losing formatting. DataViz also makes a program for the PC, but well, PCs can't read Mac disks, like Macs can read PC disks, so I don't know how useful it'd be.
http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/i
Personally, these days, I use my PCs, and my Solaris box at work more than my mac (until I need BBEdit), however, I'm surpised to see this sort of completely unsupported mac-bashing on a website that always bitches about the 'FUD' from Microsoft.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Have you ever used a USB hard-drive?
:)
What about a FireWire Hard-drive.
Okay, I have, I do, USB HDs suck.
With the worst FW bridge chip you will get 4-5MB/s transfer, with the best you will get up to about 35MB/s or so (the main bottleneck will be the IDE drive on the inside)
The best firewire drives use the Oxford 911 bridge chip (I actually like the case OWC sell (the round clear one) OtherWorld Computing
Now, USB HDs suck!
Imagine an HD which transfers 250-500KB/s
yeah... imagine it.
imagining it?
think about it...
to help you imagine it... your Cable internet is probably faster...
That means instead of saving your MP3s to your HD, it'd be faster to redownload them....
USB HDs suck!
USB should be used for keyboards and mice... Printers are a stretch, as are scanners.
FireWire rocks, but is overkill for input devices
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
IEEE1394 actually does have a chapter in The Spec for SCSI.
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
Yes.
(+1, Irony)
Lets see...
;) (like SCSI firewire transfers are essentially free))
:)
Using an Oxford 911 based firewire enclosure the performance will be about the same as the IDE... perhaps slightly slower. CPU usage will be much lower (if you have a good FireWire implementation in your kernel
If you are using a USB2.0 drive, I think you'll have to wait a while... mainly for the drives... I really don't think USB2.0 drives actually exist at this point
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
Why would one use it? No routers. 4 guys hanging out with their laptops plugged together, playing Unreal....wait a sec, geeks never leave the house. :P
This is not a problem with firewire. 400 Mbps is 50MB/s, and DV only takes 3.6MB/s. With firewire, you even have the advantage of guaranteed bandwidth, so you DV camera can get guaranteed 3.6MB/s, and your hardrive can get it's required bandwidth simultaneously without problem.
I agree with you about the USB though. You really only want to use it for low bandwidth stuff.