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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.
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.
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.
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
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
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.
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
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?
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.)
First, Firewire == Apple-branded 1394. IEEE 1394 is an IEEE spec, it has nothing to do with IBM.
Second, 1394 specifies both powered and unpowered connectors/cables. Powered is far more common. You'll see the unpowered connectors on cameras and Vaios. They're small and break off in the port.
Most devices use the powered connectors, even if they don't draw any juice. A wall-wart is always safer, since you may be sharing the power with other devices: good for recharging (iPod); bad for a reliable hard drive (but very convenient with a laptop..)
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
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.
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.
The former Device Bay consortium home page, "www.device-bay.com", now links to something called "Euro-Teen Sluts".