[CentOS] Help setting up external drive via Firewire

Laurence Alexander Hurst L.A.Hurst at lboro.ac.uk
Wed Aug 13 08:50:01 UTC 2008


Noob Centos Admin wrote:
> I got a WD 1TB My Book with eSATA/USB/Firewire400 connectivity to backup 
> data on a client Centos 5.1 machine.
> 
> USB 2.0 works fine out of the box but is rather slow, Nautilus predicts 
> about 1+ hour to fully backup just one day's worth of data or about 100GB.
> 
> So I was hoping Firewire would be faster, which is why we got the 
> version with all 3 interfaces to experiment with first.
> 
> Following the suggestions given to another user here 
> http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15767&forum=37 
> <http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=15767&forum=37>
> 
> I updated the system's kernel to the CentoPlus 
> [noob at localhost ~]$ uname -s -r
> Linux 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5
> 
> After a reboot, everything appears to work as expected, with the 
> motherboard's TI Firewire controller detected
> [root at localhost ~]# lspci | grep 1394
> 04:07.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 
> IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
> 
> However, now I'm stuck as the system does not appear to detect the drive 
> when I connect the firewire cable and turn it on.
> I've followed some of the suggestions to check the drive status like
> "fdisk -l" but this only shows the drives already installed in the system
> "tail -f /var/log/dmesg" shows no new messages when the drive is 
> connected/powered on
> 
> So I'm at a loss as to what else I should be doing to get Firewire to 
> work and will appreciate any help on this.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 

2 things jump out:
	1. As has already been pointed out that is not a Centos Plus kernel. 
Did you reboot after installing the new kernel? (You have to reboot for 
a kernel update in order to be running the new kernel).
	2. 1 hour to copy 100GB sounds like a very good speed. Obviously the 
eSATA interface will be the fastest as it will the the same as having it 
plugged directly into the SATA controller. For reference I recently 
copied 73GB from an internal SATA drive to an internal (software) raid0 
array (made up of 2 SATA disks), and that took 1.5hours.
Regards
Laurence



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