[CentOS] Help setting up external drive via Firewire

Bill Campbell centos at celestial.com
Wed Aug 13 22:43:20 UTC 2008


On Wed, Aug 13, 2008, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 13, 2008 5:28 PM +0800 Noob Centos Admin  
> <centos.admin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ieee1394: Node 0-00:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048]
>
> S400 is 400 megabits, while USB 2 is 480 megabits. Firewire has less 
> packet overhead, which might explain WD's claim that the FireWire 
> interface is a little faster.

My experience with Firewire has not been all that good.  I figured that
since Apple had been using it for years, and it is an IEEE standard, that
Firewire would be more reliable than USB.  I was also a bit wary as the USB
disk drivers on SuSE gave warning messages saying they might not be very
reliable.

I first used Firewire external drives in 2003 on whatever was the current
version of SuSE Pro at the time, and on a FreeBSD 4.8 system, and have
Firewire drives on several SuSE systems up to SuSE Linux Enterprise 10.

The FreeBSD machine has never shown any problems with its FW drive, but the
SuSE systems often seem to stop talking to the drive for no apparent
reason.

At this time, most of our Linux boxes are running USB 2.0, and the external
Firewire-only drives are all on our Macs which seem to have far better FW
support than Linux.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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