Hello!
I have a external Firewire enclosure which I have fitted with a Barracuda ATA Hard disk.
The issue I am having is to do with transfer speed. When in the firewire enclosure, the drive cannot go higher then 9MB/s. While if I install it in my PC (using the PATA interface) The drive does 45MB/s easily.
I tried a selection of drives, from maxtors to seagates and others. None of them can do more than 9MB/s transfer rate when in the firewire enclosure. Now one thing I came across is if I disable DMA when the drive is connected to the PATA interface, the max speed for all the drives is also 9MB/s.
Anyone have any idea why? It would look to me as if the drive's DMA is not enabled when in the firewire enclosure. but I have no idea how to enable firewire DMA. hdparm is rather useless when the disk is in the firewire enclosure (the disk then appears as a SCSI disk, sda).
I believe my firewire card is 400Mb/s. that should be able to do more than 9MB/s (and it would be nice, as I need it to be fast as I run vmware images from it). This is also my first experience with firewire, so any help is appreciated
Some stats:
OS: Gentoo linux 2007.0
Kern: 2.6.20-gentoo-r8
CPU: AMD XP (Athlon 4) 1.2GHz
Mem: 768MB PC133
lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133] (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363/8365 [KT133/KM133 AGP]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] (rev 40)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:07.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 16)
00:07.3 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 16)
00:07.4 Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 40)
00:08.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB12LV26 IEEE-1394 Controller (Link)
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 74)
00:0b.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. PCI0680 Ultra ATA-133 Host Controller (rev 02)
00:0d.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)
00:0d.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! Game Port (rev 07)
00:0f.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
00:0f.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
00:11.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000] (rev a4)
dmesg from connecting enclosure (I had my usb drive connected, so the enclosure is sdb in this case):
ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-01:1023
ieee1394: Node changed: 0-01:1023 -> 0-02:1023
ieee1394: sbp2: Reconnected to SBP-2 device
ieee1394: sbp2: Node 0-00:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048]
ieee1394: Node added: ID:BUS[0-01:1023] GUID[0001a3000005526a]
ieee1394: sbp2: Reconnected to SBP-2 device
ieee1394: sbp2: Node 0-00:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048]
scsi2 : SBP-2 IEEE-1394
ieee1394: sbp2: Logged into SBP-2 device
ieee1394: sbp2: Node 0-01:1023: Max speed [S400] - Max payload [2048]
scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access ST340016 A 0.01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
SCSI device sdb: 78165360 512-byte hdwr sectors (40021 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdb: got wrong page
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sdb: 78165360 512-byte hdwr sectors (40021 MB)
sdb: Write Protect is off
sdb: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sdb: got wrong page
sdb: assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: sdb1
sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sdb
sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
Any help appreciated! And if you need any more info just let me know
Thanks!