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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."
It would almost certainly be faster. FireWire is 400mbs where ATA100 is 100 and more of a drain on the CPU. FireWire is actually based off SCSI, so just imagine that FireWire is SCSI in terms of performance, only faster. Thus you can have a FireWire CD burner going and it won't bog your system like an IDE burner will (or large writes to an IDE hard drive.)
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."