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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 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.
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..
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.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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 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
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
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?
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.
There's a Dual Texas Intrument firewire transceiver (TSB41AB2) on the card, so it should be standard. I think "SB1394" is just the marketing name, like "firewire" is to apple, or "ilink" to sony. You actually get two IEEE1394 port on the card, one goes out the back, the other is inside and connects to the audigy drive providing a convenient port on the front of your computer.
The pci interface is still a secret, and there's no word from creative on whether info will be given. So if you use Linux, don't buy it for the firewire ports.
The choice seems clear if you lack the ability to process information in a logical manner. USB is a host-based bus, it needs a host controller in order for any of the devices to talk to one another. All data has to pass through a central controller (on your PC) in order for any of the devices to even see one another. FireWire on the otherhand is a host independent system as each FW device has a FW controller as one of its logic conponents. This essentially makes all FW devices their own hosts. They can connect directly to one another and intercommunicate or in a daisy chain configuration each device can talk to any other device without the intervention of some contral controller. A FW camera and HD both plugged into a computer you can tell the camera to send video to the HD and it will with no further intervention of the computer. A USB configuration like that would require all data to pass through the computer's USB controller and then into the hard drive. There's FW drives that plug directly into DV cameras and can offload video without a computer even involved. The next FW spec increases the throughput to a couple gigabits per second, in some cases current FW components with a driver update would be compatible with the new FW spec.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.