>>>>> "ab" == Alex Blewitt <alex.blew...@gmail.com> writes:
>>> 3. The quality of software inside the firewire cases varies
>>> wildly and is a big source of stability problems. (even on
>>> mac)
ab> It would be good if you could refrain from spreading FUD if
ab> you don't have experience with it.
yup, my experience was with the Prolific PL-3705 chip, which was very
popular for a while. it has two problems:
* it doesn't auto-pick its ``ID number'' or ``address'' or something,
so if you have two cases with this chip on the same bus, they won't
work. go google it!
* it crashes. as in, I reboot the computer but not the case, and the
drive won't mount. I reboot the case but not the computer, and
the drive starts working again.
http://web.ivy.net/~carton/oneNightOfWork/20061119-carton.html
I even upgraded the firmware to give the chinese another shot.
still broken.
You can easily google for other problems with firewire cases in
general. The performance of the overall system is all over the place
depending on the bridge chip you use. Some of them have problems with
``large'' transactions as well. Some of them lose their shit when the
drive reports bad sectors, instead of passing the error along so you
can usefully diagnose it---not that they're the only devices with
awful exception handling in this area, but why add one more mystery?
I think it was already clear I had experience from the level of detail
in the other items I mentioned, though, wasn't it?
Add also to all of it the cache flush suspicions from Garrett: these
bridge chips have full-on ARM cores inside them and lots of buffers,
which is something SAS multipliers don't have AIUI. Yeah, in a way
that's slightly FUDdy but not really since IIRC the write cache
problem has been verified at least on some USB cases, hasn't it? Also
since the testing procedure for cache flush problems is a
little....ad-hoc, and a lot of people are therefore putting hardware
to work without testing cache flush at all, I think it makes perfect
sense to replace suspicious components with lengths of dumb wire where
possible even if the suspicions aren't proved.
ab> I have used FW400 and FW800 on Mac systems for the last 8
ab> years; the only problem was with the Oxford 911 chipset in OSX
ab> 10.1 days.
yeah, well, if you don't want to listen, then fine, don't listen.
ab> It may not suit everyone's needs, and it may not be supported
ab> well on OpenSolaris, but it works fine on a Mac.
aside from being slow unstable and expensive, yeah it works fine on
Mac. But you don't really have the eSATA option on the mac unless you
pay double for the ``pro'' desktop, so i can see why you'd defend your
only choice of disk if you've already committed to apple.
Does the Mac OS even have an interesting zfs port? Remind me why we
are discussing this, again?
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