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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."
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.
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
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+.
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.
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.
- 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
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.