[Nolug] Firewire external enclosure - one geek's experiences

Since putting extra disk (especially 7200RPM) drives in a Shuttle
sff computer is a Bad Idea, I thought I'd see how firewire worked,
so I picked up a DAT Optic Inc. model EF3-D dual 3.5" drive enclo-
sure, for a 5400RPM 40GB & 7200RPM 60GB drive that I had originally
put in the Shuttle, before the Shuttle complained about heat.
Now, there's a single 120GB drive in the Shuttle, and these 2 older
drives in the external enclosure.

The enclosure is as long as my forearm, and an inch or so wider
than the hard drives. There is plenty of room above, below, and
between the drives.

Installation was relatively easy. The instructions are in toler-
able English, and simple enough. Since I already had ieee1394,
ohci1394,sbp2 & scsi_mod compiled as modules in my 2.4.22 kernel,
the kernel immediately recognized that a DAT Optics device had
been loaded. Once I got the proper rescan-scsi-bus.sh from
http://www.linux1394.org/, the kernel saw /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

Very simple. In fact, installing the h/w was the most difficult
part.

Since the disks were already partitioned and formatted, it was just
a matter of mounting the proper partitions.

Performance, using hdparm -i
- the directly attached modern 7200RPM 120GB drive : ~55MB/s
- the firewire-attached 2 year old 7200RPM 60GB : ~22MB/s
- the firewire-attached 3 year old 5400RPM 40GB : ~11MB/s

So, I guess those drives will be "archive drives".

A useful thing is that if I ever have to leave the house *quickly*,
I umount the 2 drives, unplug the f/w box, and run. If we ever
have to evacuate, taking those 2 small cases will be easier than
1 big case.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA
YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code
maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more than
one way to do it...default variables. The dark side of code
maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you
when code you write. If once you start down the dark path,
forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
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