Re: Help setting up external drive via Firewire

[Rainer Duffner <rainer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am 17.08.2008 um 17:42 schrieb Noob Centos Admin:

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:56 AM, Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 18:43, Bill Campbell <centos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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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