Re: [PLUG] firewire PCI cards

[Darin Strait <darin.strait@ashdar-partners.com>]

Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
> I'm buying a firewire PCI card in order to hook up an external
> firewire hard drive.  I would suspect that the card would basically
> just work.  
I would suspect that the clincher is whether or not the chip on the card 
is supported by the linux firewire implementation. I last dabbled in 
firewire back around 2002.  I expect that things are much better by now. 
I would make sure that whatever chip implements firewire on the card is 
supported by the linux 1394 implementation in whatever kernel you are 
using. I would do that by googling around to see who has had success 
with a particular chip and (something resembling) my kernel, then I 
would buy something similar from newegg.

FWIW, I found that firewire was less stable that I wanted in 2002. Disks 
would drop offline, typically when I was writing backups to them. The 
firewire modules were under very heavy development at the time. After 
some weeks of frustration, I gave up and just started using USB2. The 
data rates were similar to (if not quite as good as) the firewire, but 
the drives would stay up. Working and slow is usually better than broken.

(To be fair, things were iffy on Windows as well. My problem might 
actually have been the chips in the external drives themselves, which 
were a combo of firewire and very early USB 2.0.)

I know that firewire is supposed to be faster, but I don't need hot rod 
performance when it comes to external drives. Of course, if your drive 
is firewire only, you don't have a choice.


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