[CentOS] Help setting up external drive via Firewire

[Rainer Duffner]

Am 17.08.2008 um 17:42 schrieb Noob Centos Admin:

>
>
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:56 AM, Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at gmail.com 
> > wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 18:43, Bill Campbell <centos at celestial.com>  
> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Same here. I just migrated our backups from Firewire 800 to USB2,
> because the Firewire was causing us a kernel crash per week and we
> were having to reboot our server because of the backup drives. This on
> three different machines, one running SuSE 10 and two others with
> CentOS 5 with the centosplus kernel.
>
> I haven't had any problem with the machine since the FW drive was  
> plugged in and left plugged in since I have not been physically back  
> on location. What causes this crash and how would I know it is  
> related to FW or not, in the event but hopefully never, the system  
> does crash?
>


Some drivers don't seem to cope very well with the spurious bus-resets  
and disconnects that seem to plague most firewire drives.
I once had to move 750 GB to two FW drives because I had to rebuild a  
SATA2-RAID on a different controller.
At that time, my FreeBSD6.2 notebook (with Firewire on board) even  
seemed a bit faster (with USB2) than the SLES9 server (Dual Precott  
Xeons) with Firewire 800.
But FreeBSD also crashed from time to time, though it seemed to handle  
bus-resets and link-losses a bit better.
Getting a card that was supported on SLES was funny anyway - SuSE  
would not recommend a card to buy, because nobody knows which cards  
contain which chips.
If it doesn't work, buy another one.
Repeat until it works....

More recently, a 1 TB WD "MyBook" (USB) just died in the process of  
moving 700 GB of files on it.
Moral of the story:
- Firewire is cool (I _love_ the target-mode in my Macs), but the  
implementation sucks most of the the time.
- USB2.0 doesn't suck much less. It's just used more widely and  
obvious bugs show up often enough so that they might get fixed (in a  
revision of the hardware you don't own...)
- in my book, USB means "Useless Serial Bus" - because it's obviously  
not suited for much more than keyboards, mice and the occasional camera)




Rainer
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