LaCie Disk
The LaCie disk I had ordered, arrived last weekend and besides some testing I finally got to use it today. I had to go with the Firewire option because my PowerBook still has USB 1.1 only and well… 1MB/s just doesn’t cut it for me and FireWire is nice.
Using FireWire 800 with a PowerMac G5 I was able to reach 45MB/s average. On my PowerBook using plain FireWire (400) I have been able to get 22MB/s sustained. Since my laptop harddisk can’t go any faster, I am quite satisfied. :)
The whole thing was a nice test for my 2.6.10 kernel too. I have
partitioned the disk with one partition for Video and Music storage and
one for backups (24 homedir backups ought to be enough for everybody).
I plugged in the LaCie disk, all USB storages devices I have and got a
nice result presented by nautilus with the help of Gnome Volume Manager
and HAL.
I’m still having a bit of problems though. Sometimes the SBP2 subsystem seems to act up and the disk becomes unreachable:
Mar 4 21:54:30 power kernel: ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command Mar 4 21:54:30 power kernel: 0×2a 00 04 18 ae 60 00 00 f8 00Turning if on and off or letting it timeout helps, but that’s not A Real Solution™. So I’ll still have to figure this out and fix it.