[plug] Ext USB2 HD adapter vs Ext IEEE 1394

[Brad Campbell]

James Devenish wrote:
> In message <4039E850.4000907 at jensz.id.au>
> on Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 07:47:28PM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:
> 
>>Technically speaking, USB2.0 should be faster than firewire.
> 
> 
> Nominal rating for USB 2.0 might be higher than FireWire 400, but
> what about real-work usage? Although FireWire 800 would be nominally
> faster than USB 2.0, FireWire 400 may be significantly faster, too
> (but, of course, these things can depend on more than just the bus).
> After a brief Google: <http://www.barefeats.com/fire35.html>

They are consistent with my USB2.0 numbers on an 8MB 7200 RPM WD drive.
If I can get this damn ALI cardbus firewire interface working I can do some firewire benchmarks as 
well as the enclosure is a firewire/usb jobbie. (And given it can't do LBA42 and I have 200GB drives 
it's a *BIG JOBBIE*)


I spent a large sum of cash for new hard disk controllers, interfaces and lots of other bits because 
my WD2000JB drives kept locking up intermittently. Silly me, I thought it was anything other than 
the drives. Looks like I fell foul of the JB series RAID bug. All my disks were made early March 
last year and they only locked up when sitting in a RAID-5. <Sigh> If I had found the errata from WD 
earlier it might have saved me some cash. (I now have 7 WD2000JB drives sitting on the shelf playing 
off-line backup storage after upgraing to 7 Maxtor Maxline-II-Plus drives which don't lock up)
At least I have a backup now :p)

Oh and while I'm here. Those Addonics SATA enclosures arrived. Cheap plastic, but reasonably well 
built and they work well. The inbuilt cooling fan actually works well, unlike the stupid axial fans 
that come with vipower units. The Cardbus SATA interface is a SIL3112 Chip and it works well under a 
2.6 kernel. I have some PATA->SATA adaptors sitting around and SATA to my WD drives gives me 
25-40MB/s depending on where I am on the platter whereas USB2 gives me 15-20MB at the maximum.

Brad