Darin Strait on 9 Apr 2006 16:34:39 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] firewire PCI cards


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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