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."

Comments

My experience: Not good

[Billy Bo Bob]

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.

Re:My experience: Not good

[garcia]

my father is using a 40G firewire drive from Maxtor. There is no way to format the drive. If it get screwy you have to send it back to the manufactorer for a new one??

it is VERY slow and KILLS the system when trying to use it for anything. This was in Windows.

I can't even imagine what the drivers would be like in Linux.

How fast compared to ATA-100?

[techmuse]

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?

Not sure if they work under Linux yet, but..

[Ryan Amos]

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

[Jeffrey Baker]

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.

Re:Ummmm....wait......

[ncc74656]

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 stuck a 100GB Western Digital hard drive in an ADS Pyro 1394 Drive Kit. The case has its own power supply, as I doubt that FireWire is up to powering a 7200rpm hard drive (you could also install a CD burner, DVD-ROM drive, or other IDE devices (up to 5.25" half-height) in the case). Also, not all IEEE-1394 implementations provide power (Sony's i.Link comes to mind as an example).

Re:Go with USB 2.0

[PatJensen]

When you get a chance, can you please give me a referral for your crack dealer? He must sell some really good stuff.

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

Mac boot firmware not custom at all.

[Doktor Memory]

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.)

Re:How about USB 2.0?

[Graymalkin]

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.