> I'm considering implementing a disk based backup system using USB2 > hot-swap bays. I'm wondering about the stability and overall hardware > support of the current USB2 drivers (on an x86 box). I'm asking because > the man pages are somewhat slim and a bit scary in talking about USB2. > For example ehci(4) says in the BUGS section "The driver is not finished > and is quite buggy."
Apparently the man page was not updated after much development. I have removed those bogus comments. > Some basic questions I'd love to have an answer to... Of course if the > answer to the first one below is "no real support i.e. alpha" then the > rest are somewhat mute :-) > > * Is USB2 support considered experimental, alpha, beta, rc, or release? It works totally fine for us. > * Do others have such a system in use? And how is it working out? Using it fine. > * Has anyone done throughput measurements? How close to the 480Mbds > theory is practice? Most devices don't get to there, but the driver tries. > * Are there specific hardware choices that I should make? Specifically > for PCI-USB adapters as I'll be purchasing a dedicated card. They are all basically the same. > * Are hot-swap bays supported in any form? Of course with the usual > unmount caveat ;-) It's even better than that. You can kind of get away with disconnects somewhat, as vfs attempts to recover. Pedro has more work to do in this area, but the basics work. > From the archives I gather there is some support for USB2 and external > HDDs. And I know to stay away from Prolific based USB, re: > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/84162 -- I'm just looking > for some more specifics about reliability and effectiveness. All stuff should work fine.
