On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Jamie Lists wrote:
> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 11:21:35 -0800
> From: Jamie Lists <jamielist@xxxxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: CentOS mailing list <centos@xxxxxxxxxx>
> To: centos@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: USB 2 card
>
> Were looking to hook up a Lacie 2TB external drive to be our little
> rdiff-backup volume and we need a usb 2 interface.
>
> Can anyone make a suggestion to a good USB2 PCI card for centos?
I tried to add usb 2.0 card to my old, PIII, i440BX system.
[which is Fedora Core 6 rather then Centos, but I do not think this could make
any difference here. If you want, I could test with Centos 4.4 Live CD,
or install Centos 4.4]
My first try was an EDIMAX card with VIA6212L chip. I wasn't able
to get it to work as USB 2.0 acceptably with any sane meaning of
'acceptable' on my system.
With the VIA based card I could work only with USB 1.1, using USB 2.0
produced immediately lots of messages like that
reset high speed USB device
USB disconnect
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = YYYYYY
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector ZZZZZ
Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block XXXX
and of course card was useless.
Then I searched Google, and saw some comments that one should avoid Via
and Ali chips, and use NEC-based cards.
I bought i-tec USB card, and it worked flawlessly (at least with separate
IRQ for EHCI, I disabled Parallel port in BIOS, which I did not need, so
that EHCI got IRQ 7; I did that when trying to get via card with VIA
chipset working)
The card is described (in Polish) at
http://www.i-tec.pl/index.php?lang=pl&pid=2&kid=9&id=PCUSB20
and (in Czech) at
http://www.i-tec.cz/index.php?lang=cz&pid=2&kid=9&id=PCUSB20
According to the description the chip is NEC D720100 or D720101.
I have moved several hundreds of GB with that card using external
USB/ATAPI converter and ATAPI hard disk (and a few GB with external USB DVD/RW
drive) and had no problems.
The transfer rate for hard disk I got was 15-20 MB/s, while identical internal disk with
ATA/100 interface get 25-30 MB/s.
I read that 20 MB/s is close to maximal data rate one can get in USB/2
(that 480 Mbit/s seems to be a rather misleading advertising ).
You need to assess, whether about 20MB/s will be enough for your needs.
You could get some faster datarates with FireWire, but I have no experiences
with that.
[NOTE. It is quite possible, that VIA card would work better on system with more
current PCI implementation; dmesg on my systems says
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfb520, last bus=1
which, I can guess, would mean it is PCI 2.1 rather then 2.2
]
>
> Thanks,
> James
Could you possibly share with us your experiences?
Good luck,
Wojtek
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
