Re: The state of Linux FireWire

I recently rebuilt my system (see sig.) and installed Gentoo 2005.1. I
also
upgraded the kernel more recently to 2.6.16.10. I still have my Maxtor
OneTouch 250GB FireWire external drive, and I can still only get around
15MB/s performance out of it. Bear in mind that this drive (and many other
enclosures) has an Oxford 911 chip.

Under Windows XP, according to both Maxtor and Tom's Hardware, this drive
is
capable of pushing 35MB/s. Has anyone out there got a Linux system that
can
push those kind of numbers, or are we stuck with crippled FireWire? What
about FireWire 800? How good is the Linux support for that technology?

I recently bought several 500 GB Maxtor "One Touch II" drives, and a few
Firewire 800 cards. The cards were of different brands, but both used the
TI chipset, and had a 64-bit PCI-X interface. Doing something simple like
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdf bs=1024k", the drives will *write* at just a
hair under 60 MB/sec. However, copying large tar files to them gives
significantly lower numbers, somewhere in the 25-35 MB/sec range, if I
recall correctly.

steve


.

Relevant Pages

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