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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.
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.
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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I've never used a FireWire hard disk, but I am using an EPSON Expression1680 scanner that is connected over FireWire. This device is hot-swappable, you just disconnect it, reconnect it and it is still working. I would suspect that disks behave similar as long as they are unmounted.
Been using mine for a while and works great. I expect much work in 2.5 will be done for this.
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(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 am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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..
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.
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.
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***
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'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
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
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
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.
I used the 2.4.7 kernel and a 1394 harddrive (from ADS Tech) a few months back.
It worked fine except for the hotplugging. I could get that to work about half the time, and it seemed to be pickier than windows(drive powered up before plugging in for instance).
I've heard recent versions are much improved, but don't quote me on that.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.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.
Yeah, that $0.50 per port license fee is really gonna break the bank. May I suggest looking under your couch cushions for spare change?
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I have no idea how you got moderated as being insightful since USB 2.0 is slower than FireWire, FireWire is a more proven standard in terms of high-speed devices and the online benchmarks I've seen showed USB 2.0 as significantly slower. For what its worth, I was surprised anyone bothered benchmarking it; FireWire is fast ...
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Actually I have a sense that iPod support on Linux is inevitable, at least as long as FireWire works properly. Don't forget, there are a lot of Linux-on-Mac users around here, and all you'd have to do is rewrite the Darwin FireWire drivers to divert the data stream to a file.
/Brian
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?
You don't explain why you think Firewire is bad for storage. I don't understand your comment that it has bandwidth galore for DV but not for storage. Bandwidth is bandwidth. Fireware, SCSI, ATA and USB 2 all provide more bandwidth than a single drive than use anyway, if I'm not mistaken.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Wow. What a tirade.
FireWire is *fantastic* for storage. It's much like scsi.
Why do you not think it's suitable for hard drives?
What's 'not suitable' about cheap, easy to use, hot pluggable 80 gig drives you can just stack up for extra storage on your desk at work? or at home?
Oh. You mean desktops.
Not good for desktops. But for laptops. Or portable storage.
You've never traded DivX with others? Moved huge numbers of mp3? CD just doesn't cut it.. but a firewire drive.. ahh.. that's the ticket.
- 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
> A serial bus used for products like mice and modems won't even touch the throughput on a
> FireWire drive.
While I agree with your opinion, you have to be careful with that statement. Both busses are serial, and both can be used for "mice and modems". The fact that there are no 1394 mice has more to do with the (lack of) availability of ultra-cheap chipsets than with its poor suitability for that task. In fact, if anything, USB should be commended for incorporating a low-speed mode that can be bit banged by micros, while still allowing high-speed devices on the same bus. The fact that USB 1.x was 12Mb has more to do with it being designed for a price point, rather than with inherent problems in the USB protocol or topology. I like both USB and Firewire, they're both very elegant technologies that are helping us eliminate the mess that was before. Just because their respective corporate parents are squabbling doesn't mean we as consumers shouldn't love both.
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!
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".
Why not? Are the seek times more? What are the practical problems with firewire vs. IDE?
Hot plugability is an issue? How many times will you actually use this?
Four times a day, Monday through Friday, at the very least. Sharing with 2 PCs... I'd also use it for backup purposes if it really worked well. Why bother with tape backups when I can spend $200 and back up 80 gigs?
If speed isn't an issue, what's wrong with IDE?
As I said, hot swappability, and the ability to add more than two devices without a significant speed detriment (and the ability to add more than 3 HDs at all, besides my CD-rom).
Another advantage is that I won't have to spend 2 hours installing the drives in my parents' computers when I give the old drives to them and buy new ones.
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.
My rough estimate would be $250x3 for 3 80 gig drives, plus $100 for the 1384 card. What hot swappable reasonably fast (no tape drives) solution do you know of for $850 for 240 gigs?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
You're thinking Parallel SCSI (SPI SPI-2...).
There's a standard for SCSI over firewire: SCSI-SBP-2. Also Fibre Channel (SCSI-FCP) is hot-pluggable, no termination, no IDs to set, etc...
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
When you dig down into the SBP-2 layer of IEEE-1394 you will find that it is SCSI. SCSI commands and responses are used for the mass storage device on IEEE-1394. The only thing that is different is the physical and low level signal transmission. So, at the software level (once you get above the lowest level packet sender/receiver) there is no difference from scsi.
:-) A 12% cost savings will win in the end.
At the physical level you get to trade a 50 or 68 pin connector and cable for a 6 or 4 pin connector and cable. The controller chips probably cost about the same in volume, maybe a couple of bucks different. A good SCSI cable (and don't mess with bad ones) is $50. A good firewire cable is $7.
There is your reason. A $300 disk is $350 with
SCSI and $308 with Firewire. (I added a dollar for the $0.50 license fee on the ports at each end of the cable.
Non-tangibles such as easy configuration, the ability to pile a dump truck load of disks on a single interface, and not becoming ensnared in a wriggling mass of cables are just nice bonuses.
(I have used SCSI for ages, but now prefer IEEE-1394 for my archival storage machines. I still use SCSI for my high reliability and high performance machines, but that is more a Linux driver issue than anything intrinsically IEEE-1394.)
It's actually easier to run it over FireWire than over IDE, because the FireWire sbp2 driver exposes CD devices directly to the sg driver. No need for ide-scsi or its analog.
However, your kernel will blow up if you use a stock kernel's 1394 driver to write CDs in "real" mode. Get the CVS code from the linux1394 project site and use either the current or "last stable" branch.
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
Spending some karma to get this Score:0 post looked at. Mod the parent up.
Ob on topic section: The mobile racks are absolutely wonderful. I use them all the time to move drives around. One problem in addition to them not being hotswappable is that you have to change the master and slave setting by opening up the drawer if you need a different setting in the two different locations. Another reason it would be great to have a firewire mobile rack.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Sounds good to me. I've had zero problems with my 5400, considering the drive is mainly just there for mp3s, rpms, isos, backups, and when I shut the computer off at night, wiping out my half gig of ram. And once I get the firewire drives up and running I'll probably be making a server to stick in the closet or basement and not have to deal with the shutting down at night part anyway.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
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
Well, USB 2.0 might be 400Mbit, but I thought it was a shared bus? Whereas firewire isn't shared? Plus, firewire devices have their own controller chips and don't make the CPU do any of the work...
Considering the market freebsd is generally intended for (servers) and the market firewire in general is intended for (desktops), it's gonna take one super dedicated freebsd developer with an itch for firewire before freebsd sees anything even close to even Linux's mediocre support.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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
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.
Well, thanks for the attempt at helping, but you're kind of making my point.
I'm a total newbie, so:
1) I have no idea how to "load modules"
2)I have no idea what 'proc/partitions' is
3)I don't know how to 'just mount 'em or whatever'.
It is very disappointing that this kind of command line mumbo jumbo is still necessary when using a bleeding edge new distribution of Linux. Is it really programatically so difficult to check for available partitions and mount them automatically on startup?
I'm no technophobe, but it's this kind of nonsense that stops people from using Linux. Period.
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.
Firewire has some pretty handy server uses too. Think about it: hot-pluggable high-speed drives?
Firewire backup... mmm, yummy.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
The former Device Bay consortium home page, "www.device-bay.com", now links to something called "Euro-Teen Sluts".
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.
You're out of your mind. Here's a concrete example of FireWire being far better for mass storage than USB -- ever wonder why you can't find any USB CD-RWs that transfer faster than 4x? That's right, because the USB bus can't handle anything faster. Try for higher bandwidth, get coasters. This problem simply does not exist with FireWire. At up to 50MB/s (that's *bytes*, not bits), it won't for a long, long time. The throughput of pretty much every USB 1.0 device is bandwidth-limited by the bus, save the doofy little serial interfaces. That's why USB 2.0 is out. But I don't think I heard you say anything about that...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Macs have FOR MORE THAN A DECADE read DOS formatted disks. My macs can read FAT formatted zip disks. [Luckily, I had SCSI in my pc, so I didn't have to wait for the IDE Zip drives].
n dex.html
I've now had one of the 80G Maxtor drives since about April/May, and it's worked fine for me, moving files between a G3 portable, G4 desktop, win98 desktop, win2k desktop, and a winME desktop.
On the windows side, you have to go down to the lower right corner, and tell it to unmount the disk before you pull it. With the Mac, you just handle it as you would normally unmount a disk (drag to the trash).
Now, as for this 'doesn't read others' crap, let's look at the whole details -- As HFS uses two forks (data, resource), if you attempt to write a Mac file in anything other than 'raw data' mode, it'll create a directory 'resourcefolder' or something of that sort, and store the resource fork there. If you then use a non-mac to move the file, you'll lose the resource fork. This isn't an issue for many types of data files, as may have comments (like where a JPEG was downloaded from), or some minor save state information (BBEdit save state). This is an issue for applications, however. If you're going to need to move files around on the non-mac system, it's best to save them as some sort of an archive, or write 'em out to MacBinary.
There is, however, one additional issue. UNIX, DOS and Mac all use different line endings on text files. Normally, files are transfered between different systems using 'FTP', and you'd just force it to acsii mode to deal with this problem. If you're writing to a local disk, you'll have to know what line endings the recipient will need. WordPad (PC) or BBEdit (Mac) will handle foreign line endings. Not being a Linux user, I don't know if there are editors that handle this issue. [there's 'dos2unix' and the like, or you can just do some simple subsitutions on the file].
Macs for a damned long time even shipped with 'MacLink', a program which would let you convert different DOS/Mac/whatever files from different applications, so that you could open a Word5DOS file in WP3.5Mac without losing formatting. DataViz also makes a program for the PC, but well, PCs can't read Mac disks, like Macs can read PC disks, so I don't know how useful it'd be.
http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/i
Personally, these days, I use my PCs, and my Solaris box at work more than my mac (until I need BBEdit), however, I'm surpised to see this sort of completely unsupported mac-bashing on a website that always bitches about the 'FUD' from Microsoft.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
That doesn't mean advanced users wouldn't have access to the 'mount' command if they wanted. But no one has given me one good reason that Linux doesn't scan for and automount drives.
Are you saying that having to type a bunch of command line stuff just to use a drive that's already in the system is a GOOD thing?
That makes that rather easy, then, doesn't it?
/Brian
Windows seems to handle this 'problem' without incident.
Probably by not locking the drive door, and throwing exceptions (think "signals") to any applications that try to read from the CD.
Actually, CD-ROMs are a poor example here, because they are read-only, so think about Zip disks, floppies, or DirectCDs. If you eject one at the wrong time under Windows, as under Unix, you will get filesystem corruption.
Windows seems to try and minimise this effect by disabling write caching to removable media. Certainly, some people would see this as an acceptible tradeoff - even Linus Torvalds has been known to advocate the position that "the floppy light should never go off while there is still cached write data".
However, architecture gets in the way. Windows comes from MS-DOS which was almost stateless -- not much caching anywhere, look for a drive where you think "A:" should be, and if it's there you can use it. Unix has more of a high-availability heritage; thus the concept of formally mounting a filesystem rather than just seeing what's happens to be in the drive right now.
If you really want a Windows-esque way to handle floppies (and other removables) there are two approaches: (a) use a user-space filesystem layer that uses block devices to emulate / replace the kernel-level filesystem. This is done by the mtools package, and (I think) by "desktop projects" that feel users will be uncomfortable with mounting - cf. KIO and the GNOME VFS. (b) Use supermount, a Linux kernel patch implementing a filesystem shim layer, written back in the 2.0 days and since ported reluctantly to 2.2 and 2.4. Supermount works by being absurdly forgiving in the face of users ejecting and inserting things without permission, while still retaining an element of at least read caching. Read the patch sometime (or just the design notes) to see how awkward this was to accomplish.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README