Firewire drive?

[uralmasha]

I am going to get an external harddrive. From other threads I understood there is not much trouble to expect from a USB drive (please correct me if I'm wrong). But what about Firewire? I do not own any firewire devices, so I have a pretty vage Idea how it functions.

 

I noticed that this interface behaves like a network interface, in both Linux anf Windws, but thatś it. So, my question is: is thre going to be headache to make it work? (apart from the fact that my internal hd drive is unlikely to saturate those 400/800 mB/s anyway... or am I missing something here, too?).

[scarecrow]

Normally, there's no trouble with Firewire drives (harddisks and DVD burners) under Linux.

However, there are some multicontrollers or videocards which among other things provide a very poorly supported (for windows XP) firewire port. Suffice to say that the Linux support for these controllers is next to nonexistent, and so there's a problem.

But any normal standalone firewire controller should be supported by the kernel, and work with little fuss.

[uralmasha]

thanks, scarecrow.

What those "some multicontrollers" would be? I do not have a separate FW controller, there is one "onboard", is that what you mean? :huh:

I own an Abit Ultra motherboard with an Nvidia nForce-4 chipset. There is a forcedeth module that gets loaded, and it dioesn't complain at anything. Still wondering if it is risky to cough up thse extra €25 for firewire connectivity....

[pmpatrick]

You may want to take a look at this thread on the pclos board:

 

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=625.0

 

Pclos is mandriva based and there were problems getting the modules loaded for firewire drive detection. This may indicate similar problems are likely on mandriva. It's not a big deal; you just have to edit your config files to make sure the necessary modules are loaded at boot but you should be aware of the problem.

 

I recently bough a hard drive enclosure from Apricorn and paid extra for dual firewire/usb connectivity. I personally think it was a waste of money as I rarely bother connecting the drive with firewire. If I had it to do over again, I would have gotten the usb2 enclosure only.

Firewire is suppose to be a little faster but the real hassle is keeping track of two sets of cables. I have only the two firwire cables that came with the drive but tons of usb2 cables not to mention usb hubs and front side usb ports on the case. It's just easier to use usb. Unless you already have some significant investment in firewire technology, I wouldn't bother.

[uralmasha]

Thanks, pmpatrick.

That thread is very useful. It implies the headache I was fearing. That that guy solved his problem is great, but those

One of the problems with Firewire is that nothing gets detected, then you force one thing, and everything else gets thrown in whether you want it or not

and

Firefire hardware detection is just not "quite there yet" in Linux

worries me, given that I had some probs with iee1394 inteface hijacking "eth0" alias without my assistance.

[Qchem]

I managed to get one working with gentoo by recompiling the kernel to include the necessary bits and bobs - haven't tried it with Mandriva though - I would assume it's just trial and error in loading the correct modules.