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Firewire and Linux? 318

Posted by Cliff from the how-well-is-it-really-supported dept.
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."
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Firewire and Linux? More

Firewire and Linux?

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  • Firewire and Linux (Score:3, Informative)

    by Phaze3 ( 197763 ) <nathan.viptx@net> on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:43PM (#2565000) Homepage
    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....

    • Video Cameras (Score:3, Informative)

      by eplese ( 233688 )
      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.

  • Probably hard to boot from (Score:4, Informative)

    by MadCow42 ( 243108 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:45PM (#2565030) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Probably hard to boot from (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just a quick look on google, and it looks like Phoenix has FireWire boot support in the BIOS. However, it probably won't be enabled unless the board has integrated 1394. There's also some laptops that support booting of FW.

    • Re:Probably hard to boot from (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cutriss ( 262920 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:59PM (#2565182) Homepage
      I'm not intending to troll here, but Macs can boot from FireWire (And USB). Granted, Macs have their own custom boot firmware, but the point is that it can be done. Feasability is the issue, though. I doubt that people will want to start hacking custom BIOSes to enable FireWire as a boot device...
      • Apple uses <A HREF="http://www.freiburg.linux.de/openbios/">Open BIOS</A>.
        • Not exactly. OpenBIOS is a freeware implementation of the Open Firmware standard that Apple uses for the boot ROMs on their PCI machine. I don't think OpenBIOS is anywhere even close to a working product, actually, and Apple has been using OF since 1995.

          /Brian
          • You're right. I got the terminology confused, and then linked to the wrong page. Here is Apple's mirror of the <A HREF="http://bananajr6000.apple.com/1275/home.html ">Open Firmware</A> site. Cool stuff.
      • Heck, Macs can even boot from an iPod. :) (sure it makes sense, as the iPod is just a harddrive, but it's still cool)

        - j
      • 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 [sun.com], 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 [realweasel.com] to get on PCs.

        (Preemptive note to moderators: realweasel.com really is a hardware site.)
    • If the controller card's bios allows it to boot, then there's tricks you can manage. Back when I began my shift over to SCSI, in '96, I had a 1gb IDE and a 2gb SCSI-2 drive. My bios didn't support boot from scsi and I ran NT/95. Since I wanted to keep the two seperated and run multiple OSes, I realized I could simply turn off the IDE controller in the bios. I thus booted from SCSI, loaded NT, and had full access to my IDE drive since (like Linux?) it ignores/by-passes the bios. If I wanted '95, turn it on. No problem.

      If he has IDE and Firewire components, and runs a modern OS, then he could do the same thing. Turn off the IDE controllers (perhaps just the one with the harddrive, not CDROM/DVD so he can boot from them). The firewire card's bios thus boots the drive, the OS detects the IDE components, and he's cool.

  • a lot of info is available (Score:5, Informative)

    by sam@caveman.org ( 13833 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:46PM (#2565036) Homepage
    check out linux1394.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]. lots of info about which cards have good linux drivers, and how good the drivers are, etc.

    -sam

    • Re:a lot of info is available (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @03:01PM (#2565209)
      Just to let you all know, I use two 80gig 1394 external drives. Basically they are an ata100 drive with a bit of hardware in the enclosure to convert to 1394. Two weeks ago, I lost the controller card in the enclosure of one of the drives. Not only did I loose the data, but also the drives themselves were damaged due to this. Being that they are Maxtor drives, they did a great job on replacing the faulty equipment, but to bad for the data. This is not only a problem for Linux, but also for windows. Buyers beware. Firewire has great potential for many things, if only they didn't have a problem with the controllers.

  • My experience: Not good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Billy Bo Bob ( 87919 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:46PM (#2565038)
    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.

  • EPSON Scanners are supported (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by specht ( 13174 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:46PM (#2565046) Homepage
    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.
  • (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.
    • Well.. Sometimes. If it's a true FireWire device (Apple's implementation) then there are 2 extra pins and with current running through them. If it's IEEE 1394 (IBM's implementation) then the bus is unpowered. There's not much power running through it regardless, so a lot of true FireWire drives still need AC adapters. Most devices use a plug simply because they want to be compatible with the unpowered version (which is cheaper and seems to be more popular.)

      • Re:Ummmm....wait...... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by afs ( 107871 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @04:25PM (#2565755)
        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..)
      • again, as people told you before in reference to your other incorrect post, you're getting your facts mixed up.

        IEEE is not IBM; IEEE is the standards body (not really that, but let's just play along). just like IEEE 1284 is a standard for parallel printer cable interfaces.

        It's a bunch of engineering geeks agreeing how the interface should work. apple is their own enhanced version, which they helped to create so it's their wont to do so.

        don't forget i.Link! hahahaha
    • Both my Firewire devices (a UMax Astra scanner and a Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge) have wall-warts.

    • Re:Ummmm....wait...... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ncc74656 ( 45571 )
      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 [westerndigital.com] hard drive in an ADS Pyro 1394 Drive Kit [adstech.com]. 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).
    • A numberof camcorders will only allow data to be transferred over firewire and will not take power from it. (FYI)
      Chris

  • How fast compared to ATA-100? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by techmuse ( 160085 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:49PM (#2565076)
    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?
    • it depends on what the ROM on the device tells the controller. the Device lets the controler know how much bandwidth it requires and the controler hands it the exact amount of bandwidth.
    • It would almost certainly be faster. FireWire is 400mbs where ATA100 is 100 and more of a drain on the CPU. FireWire is actually based off SCSI, so just imagine that FireWire is SCSI in terms of performance, only faster. Thus you can have a FireWire CD burner going and it won't bog your system like an IDE burner will (or large writes to an IDE hard drive.)
      • Except for the fact that pretty much every firewire drive out there is really just an ide drive that has a bridge to the firewire bus. Also, while the firewire spec has the potential to go to 400, none of the drives that you're going to find for $200 can put data at that kind of rate out. Take a look at this benchmark [tomshardware.com], which shows that ata/66 is about 1.5X faster than a firewire drive.

        Firewire doesn't really stack up to ide all that well in speed yet, but it certainly does beat the snot out of usb 1.x. USB 2.0 devices are starting to come out though...

      • FireWire is 400mbs where ATA100 is 100

        Right, the good ole Bytes vs. Bits swapping. Firewire is 400 Mega-bits-per-second.

        ATA-100 is 100 Mega-BYTES-per-second. E.g. twice as fast as Firewire.

        In either case, you would be hard pressed to find a drive that is capable of media-transfer rates to fill the bandwidth available.

        more of a drain on the CPU

        Horseshit,- both use PCI devices that use Bus-Master DMA. Setting up an ATA interface to do a transfer is very simple and does NOT take a lot of CPU at all. I have no experience with Firewire drivers, but I'm guessing that it takes more to manage a Firewire controller.

      • Re:How fast compared to ATA-100? (Score:5, Informative)

        by sobiloff ( 29859 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @03:42PM (#2565520)

        Be careful with your bits and bytes:

        • Ultra ATA/100 has a maximum burst transfer rate of 100 megabytes per second (MB/s), or 800 megabits per second (Mb/s).
        • Ultra 160 SCSI has a maximum sustained transfer rate of 160 megabytes per second (MB/s), or 1280 megabits per second (Mb/s).
        • IEEE 1394 has a maximum sustained transfer rate of 50 megabytes per second (MB/s), or 400 megabits per second (Mb/s).
        • USB 2.0 has a maximum sustained transfer rate of 60 megabytes per second (MB/s), or 480 megabits per second (Mb/s).
        • USB 1.1 at high speed has a maximum sustained transfer rate of 1.5 megabytes per second (MB/s), or 12 megabits per second (Mb/s).

        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.

        • There is one thing I think you overlooked in your analysis. You correctly point out the maximum BURST transfer rate of an ATA 100 drive is 100 MB/s. The key is the word BURST versus SUSTAINED. I'm not sure what the sustained MB/s is for an ATA 100 drive but I know the ATA 60 drives had a theoretical maximum sustained transfer rate of about 25-30 MB/s. I would suspect the ATA 100 drives are about 40-50 MB/s. At that rate the IEEE 1394 bus would appear to be able to handle most sustained drive transfers. Provided you don't have anything else on the bus. As always YMMV.
        • I know everyone knows this (just thought I'd mention for the newbie)

          SCSI (and I think IEEE 1394) can interleave their request/responses. Hence if you're getting a wodge from an IDE/ATA100 drive, you effectively jam it up (and this is also the only way to achieve the burst transfer). I am guessing that most OS's and drivers chunk up requests so that IDE appears to interleave things. Because of this, SCSI is faster on day-to-day useage even ignoring it's faster transfer rate. The same qualification goes for IEEE 1394 if I'm right.

          Also, you should be aware that there isn't an ATA100 drive around that can actually put through 100MB/s, that's just the bus-speed, the 7200 drives get closest. However, you normally get 2HD's on one channel, i.e. sharing the 100MB/s bandwidth.. it all gets complex + messy.. similar problems to good old-fashioned networking.

          That was all off topic, but my 2d is that IEEE 1394 is great.. watching my Sony camera stream video to an iMac in realtime was quite funky when you realise the implications :) (I don't think there are scsi ports on many cameras ;)

          Some links:

          As someone mentioned earlier, all important drivers: http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

          Grab your vids: http://www.schirmacher.de/arne/dvgrab/index_e.html [schirmacher.de]

          more stuff, lots of links: http://www.coastweb.de/dv/ [coastweb.de]

          Also, DVD-RW isn't the only option, many DVDplayers will play VCDs too (use only a CD-RW)
          http://www.vcdhelp.com/ [vcdhelp.com]

          hey ho.. moderate me for off topic :)
      • ATA100 is faster:

        400 mbs is only 400 millibits/sec. ;-)

        Seriously it's largely irrelevant. The spindle speed upto about 10000 rpm drives can't max out an ATA66 cable never mind ATA100; and that assumes that the bottleneck is the hard-drive. Usually it is the processor.
    • It's probably going to be the same speed, since the drive will be the bottleneck.

  • Not sure if they work under Linux yet, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ryan Amos ( 16972 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:50PM (#2565082)
    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..

  • It's not Linux, but... (Score:1, Informative)

    by kaldari ( 199727 )
    Darwin probably has the best Firewire support of any of the unix flavors out there.
    http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/

  • External drive noise (Score:2, Informative)

    by curtis ( 18867 )
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:54PM (#2565129)
    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.

  • Power... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @02:55PM (#2565142)
    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.

    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=1127 ).

    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 ;-)

    • filesystem problems?! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Pyromage ( 19360 )
      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.

    • Re:Power... (Score:5, Informative)

      by JPRelph ( 519032 ) <james@[ ]macplace.co.uk ['the' in gap]> on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @03:53PM (#2565582) Homepage
      I've used Macs since system 7, and back then it had no problem with DOS disks. I'm using OSX now and it has no problems whatsoever with Windows disks, and the system will happily reside on a ufs system.
      • Do macs have "native" (I'm not sure what the best word is) support for vfat drives? I know that with PC-formatted floppies, Macs don't have a good time with long filenames, and they also add resource.frk files to the disks when they're browsed. I've never tried a vfat formatted hard disk, and I don't know whether it has similar issues. Does anyone know how well they're supported?

        • Re:Power... (Score:3, Informative)

          by hearingaid ( 216439 )

          The MacOS filename limit under HFS is 31 characters IIRC. I suspect this no longer applies under OS X, with its native ufs support.

          They'll probably add resource.frk files still, or perhaps .AppleDouble directories (which is what appear on my netatalk server).

          However, they do support tons of disk formats natively.

          And, BTW, what's more, you can mount HFS drives on Linux. :)

    • 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].

      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/in dex.html [dataviz.com]

      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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.

    • 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?

    • 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 it is an interesting questions. Also for laptops, which are very restricted in their expandability.
    Does anybody know if there are any Ethernet or Wireless Ethernet interfaces for Firewire (like the network interfaces that are available for USB).
  • 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.
  • I'm a tech in a Mac repair shop. We've seen a lot of Firewire dirve usage in the last year or so. One thing you need to know is that inside the firewire case is most likely an IDE drive. Make sure that it's a fairly fast drive. I saw a user with a 5400 rpm drive get pissed when they realized what they had bought.



    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 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.

  • Oxford 911 chip (Score:4, Informative)

    by tortus ( 463651 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @03:18PM (#2565361)
    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.

  • Stuff you might want to know about Maxtor firewire (Score:5, Informative)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @03:18PM (#2565363) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • 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 few 1394 observations (Score:5, Informative)

    by lordsutch ( 14777 ) <chris@lordsutch.com> on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @03:38PM (#2565482) Homepage
    I've been doing some work with 1394 devices under Linux, both as a personal hobby and for my employers. This is what I've been able to determine:
    • 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 [sourceforge.net] and read the docs over there; you'll probably want to get their drivers anyway, instead of using what's in the stock kernel.

  • Some Answers (Score:2, Informative)

    by __david__ ( 45671 )
    How good is the driver support?

    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

  • ieee1394 is ideal for connecting camcorders and digital cameras to a Linux system.

    This link [sourceforge.net] 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. [schirmacher.de]

    The same website hosts the dvgrab [schirmacher.de] and Kino [schirmacher.de] 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 [sourceforge.net].
  • As a proud owner of a Sony Vaio laptop, it saddens me to see that, from the linux1394 homepage, "Not [emphasis theirs] supported are the proprietary Sony chipset found in various Vaio systems". Thus I continue to have to dual-boot into Windows, rip to HDD, and mount the underlying VFAT FS under Linux.

    Kinda klunky, to say the least...

    Dabe

  • FIrewaire and Linux (Score:2, Informative)

    by sboss ( 13167 )
    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.

  • Beware of Cheap Firewire Drives (Score:3, Informative)

    by omnirealm ( 244599 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @05:37PM (#2566332) Homepage
    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.

  • dvbackup, firewire (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ultrapenguin ( 2643 )
    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?

  • What happened with Device Bay? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday November 15, 2001 @02:28AM (#2567585) Homepage
    There's a spec called Device Bay for removable IEEE-1394 drives. It's a spec for the physical connector and packaging, so you can just plug IEEE-1394 drives in. Nobody uses it. Unclear why. It beats the "little boxes all over the desk" concept. You can get IEEE-1394 drives, and you can get proprietary removable drive packaging, but as yet, Device Bay is rare.

    The former Device Bay consortium home page, "www.device-bay.com", now links to something called "Euro-Teen Sluts".

  • cpu usage ide vs firewire (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

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