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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."
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
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.
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.
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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.
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***
Well.. Sometimes. If it's a true FireWire device (Apple's implementation) then there are 2 extra pins and with current running through them. If it's IEEE 1394 (IBM's implementation) then the bus is unpowered. There's not much power running through it regardless, so a lot of true FireWire drives still need AC adapters. Most devices use a plug simply because they want to be compatible with the unpowered version (which is cheaper and seems to be more popular.)
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
Did you try the cvs source from sourceforge (site mentioned earlier by someone else. It says storage support is recently supported and NOT stable in kernel release...you must patch it with the updates from cvs, if you did not you will have problems, also if you used kernels 2.4.7-2.4.11 you will have stability problems, must use 2.4.6 or 2.2.12+.
Firewire is 400 Mbits/s while ATA-100 is 100 Mbytes/s (==800 Mbits/s or twice the speed of Firewire).
Firewire doesn't really stack up to ide all that well in speed yet, but it certainly does beat the snot out of usb 1.x. USB 2.0 devices are starting to come out though...
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.
iirc, the 1394 spec started life as the SCSI-3 committee. In other words, FireWire is what SCSI was supposed to evolve into - including among other things, much cheaper chipsets and cabling.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
that's' stuff in the windows drivers. audigy support is coming along nicely for linux thanks in most part to Daniel Bertrand who has been getting things done at a feverish pace. Check out the audigy tag from the emu10k1 cvs at www.opensource.creative.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.
FireWire is 400mbs where ATA100 is 100
Right, the good ole Bytes vs. Bits swapping. Firewire is 400 Mega-bits-per-second.
ATA-100 is 100 Mega-BYTES-per-second. E.g. twice as fast as Firewire.
In either case, you would be hard pressed to find a drive that is capable of media-transfer rates to fill the bandwidth available.
more of a drain on the CPU
Horseshit,- both use PCI devices that use Bus-Master DMA. Setting up an ATA interface to do a transfer is very simple and does NOT take a lot of CPU at all. I have no experience with Firewire drivers, but I'm guessing that it takes more to manage a Firewire controller.
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.
- 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
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!
Be careful with your bits and bytes:
Hence, Ultra 160 SCSI is faster than Ultra ATA/100, which is faster than IEEE 1394. Don't get me wrong -- I think 1394 is great, but don't throw out your ATA or SCSI interfaces quite yet.
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.
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
There is one thing I think you overlooked in your analysis. You correctly point out the maximum BURST transfer rate of an ATA 100 drive is 100 MB/s. The key is the word BURST versus SUSTAINED. I'm not sure what the sustained MB/s is for an ATA 100 drive but I know the ATA 60 drives had a theoretical maximum sustained transfer rate of about 25-30 MB/s. I would suspect the ATA 100 drives are about 40-50 MB/s. At that rate the IEEE 1394 bus would appear to be able to handle most sustained drive transfers. Provided you don't have anything else on the bus. As always YMMV.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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
The former Device Bay consortium home page, "www.device-bay.com", now links to something called "Euro-Teen Sluts".
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.
I know everyone knows this (just thought I'd mention for the newbie)
:) (I don't think there are scsi ports on many cameras ;)
l
:)
SCSI (and I think IEEE 1394) can interleave their request/responses. Hence if you're getting a wodge from an IDE/ATA100 drive, you effectively jam it up (and this is also the only way to achieve the burst transfer). I am guessing that most OS's and drivers chunk up requests so that IDE appears to interleave things. Because of this, SCSI is faster on day-to-day useage even ignoring it's faster transfer rate. The same qualification goes for IEEE 1394 if I'm right.
Also, you should be aware that there isn't an ATA100 drive around that can actually put through 100MB/s, that's just the bus-speed, the 7200 drives get closest. However, you normally get 2HD's on one channel, i.e. sharing the 100MB/s bandwidth.. it all gets complex + messy.. similar problems to good old-fashioned networking.
That was all off topic, but my 2d is that IEEE 1394 is great.. watching my Sony camera stream video to an iMac in realtime was quite funky when you realise the implications
Some links:
As someone mentioned earlier, all important drivers: http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/
Grab your vids: http://www.schirmacher.de/arne/dvgrab/index_e.htm
more stuff, lots of links: http://www.coastweb.de/dv/
Also, DVD-RW isn't the only option, many DVDplayers will play VCDs too (use only a CD-RW)
http://www.vcdhelp.com/
hey ho.. moderate me for off topic