Re: Coolmax HD-211-COMBO with Prolific PL3507 chipset

From: John Stoffel (stoffel_at_lucent.com)
Date: 09/02/04

  • Next message: Stuart Young: "Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4"
    Date:	Thu, 2 Sep 2004 10:48:40 -0400
    To: Andrew Haninger <ahaning@gmail.com>
    
    

    Andrew> I recently purchased a USB2+Firewire 2.5" portable harddrive
    Andrew> enclosure. The enclosure is from Coolmax and is a
    Andrew> HD-211-COMBO. The chipset is a Firewire and USB2 all-in-one
    Andrew> deal called PL3507 from Prolific. I've read a bit about this
    Andrew> chipset and few people (who are talking, at least) seem to
    Andrew> have much success with it. I am strongly considering returning
    Andrew> the enclosure for a refund.

    Return it. I've got a Prolific chipset enclosure and I can't make it
    work properly under either Linux of my wife's Windows 2000 box. I
    paid's my money and took's my chances. I'm a sucker.

    Andrew> I have been able to get it to be detected and work on just one
    Andrew> machine running Linux; an IBM xSeries 206 server running
    Andrew> Fedora Core 2 (kernel 2.6.5). The device is rarely detected,
    Andrew> but when it is, it seems to use the EHCI driver and it works
    Andrew> fine until you unplug it and try to plug it back in. This
    Andrew> behavior is not only limited to Linux, though. I have found
    Andrew> just one Windows machine so far that detects it fine even if
    Andrew> it is unplugged and plugged back in.

    Detection was never the problem for me under either Linux or Windows,
    it was that if you started writing data to it, it would choke and hang
    completely. You could run badblocks on the device without problems,
    do a mkfs as well. No problem. Just try to write too much data (or
    as I suspect in too large chunks) and it just wigged out and locked up
    the drive. At least under firewire it didn't take down the box.

    It didn't work much better under USB2.0 (linux only testing though)
    since it would write more data, but it would completely hang the
    system.

    Andrew> So, while I'm very likely going to make use of Newegg's 30-day
    Andrew> money-back guarantee, I thought I'd try to help the community
    Andrew> out however I can. Not everyone has the luxury of being able
    Andrew> to return their hardware for a refund. So if I can help
    Andrew> someone who is developing a driver by testing it, I'd like to
    Andrew> do that. If anyone has any drivers that they are writing that
    Andrew> might help to make this device work on Linux, I would be happy
    Andrew> to be a guinea pig for your project.

    The only thing I've seen which I haven't had time to work on yet,
    thanks to a two year old little boy, is to take the iee1394 drives
    from the 2.6.2 kernel and move them forward to the 2.6.8 kernel. Some
    people have reported success with the sbp2 driver in that case.

    In my case, I suspect that the prolific chipset sucks rocks.

    John
       John Stoffel - Senior Unix Systems Administrator - Lucent Technologies
             stoffel@lucent.com - http://www.lucent.com - 978-952-7548
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  • Next message: Stuart Young: "Re: silent semantic changes with reiser4"

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