RE: Recommended 1394 chipsets?

Yes the key is ask the vendor.

I started off with my firewire shared drive a year or so ago.

I used it try out Oracle Real Application Clusters I found the WD-120 drive
was fine. So someone else says: 'Hey Bruce I want to do the same thing'
send me your Model number. So I do. So they bought it. Know what, it
doesn't work. So we used digital cameras and swapped the tag on the bottom
of the drive (yes I know sad isn't it). They were different and I don't
just mean the SN. So I mail Western Digital and they say that they stopped
using the Oxford chipsets several months ago and now use LSI. Which as you
can see from the list below will not allow sharing.

The real issue here, I believe, is that this functionality is driven by
Microsoft and Microsoft compatibility is the only driver in the
manufacturer's radar. Last time I checked the knowledge base Microsoft
aren't even thinking about shareable drives on ieee1394.

I know some people offer sharing between Mac and PC and I have no idea how
this is done unless it is just a hot plug rather than a real share.

The answer is in our hands. Write to the manufacturers and say you want
support for multiple logins. Say you will buy something else if they don't
support this.

I am now using two LaCie drives (the 120Gb and the 250Gb) which work fine.
This doesn't constitute an endorsement but they do what I need to do really
well.

Regards

Bruce

-----Original Message-----
From: linux1394-user-admin@lists.sourceforge.net
[mailto:linux1394-user-admin@lists.sourceforge.net]On Behalf Of Stefan
Richter
Sent: 05 June 2004 20:55
To: ashieh@cs.cornell.edu
Cc: linux1394-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: Recommended 1394 chipsets?

On 5 Jun, Alan Shieh wrote:
> I'm still concerned about the IDE
> enclosure though. When I last looked into 1394/IDE enclosures for
> clustering purposes (1 year ago), not all IDE enclosures supported the
> proper SBP-2 disconnect commands (excuse my imprecise language; I am not
> an expert on SCSI/1394 terminology) for sharing a target drive.

Do you mean "multiple initiator capability", i.e. several hosts
(initiators) may log in at the same time?

This is indeed not supported by many bridges. 1st, the link chip
must -obviously- support it. 2nd, the firmware of the bridge must
not criplle this capability. As for chip support for simultaneous
logins, we had a discussion here in early April that brought up
this list:

SBP2 link chip maximum concurrent logins
-------------------------------------------
LSI 501 rev B3 1
OXFW911 4
OXFW922 2
SYM13FW500 1
TSB42AA9 1

Ask the vendor before purchase.

--
Stefan Richter
-=====-=-=-- -==- --=-=
http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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