[KLUG Members] Re: Ext USB HD compatibility -- yeah, go FireWire (or get devices that do both)

[Tim Gray]

On Monday 06 January 2003 01:46 pm, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Quoting Tim Gray <tgray@adacplastics.com>:
> > I'm in the market for an external USB hard drive that's supported by
> > Linux...  Suggestions?
>
> Yeah, go FireWire.

Not an option, I'm looking for a portable external HDD, and none of our boxes 
have firewire ports on them, much less the ones at the remote facilities.

>
> FYI, you can also buy an enclosure with an ATA-to-USB/FireWire converter
> for just over $50 -- so that's another option if you have a spare ATA drive
> lying around.

That's something I didn't know.  It looks like that's the way I'll be going.  
Very convenient!

> As far as compatibility, I haven't seen a FireWire drive that didn't work
> with my Linux box.  At the same time, USB has adopted the SBP standard for
> storage, so USB compatibility in Linux for hard drives is almost as good as
> FireWire.

Which is good.


> It has to do with the design of USB.  It was designed to be
> ultra-simplistic on the host side, making it easy for Intel and Microsoft. 
> All the brains goes in the device driver for the USB device itself.  While
> standards have helped improved in many areas, they go often ignored (again,
> ACM modems).  Storage is simple though, and it wasn't hard for USB to adopt
> SBP -- especially when someone finally realized it was easy to modify those
> ATA-to-FireWire adapters to support USB as well.

It's like people heard the "you can do anything over USB" and some didn't stop 
to think if they really SHOULD do what they wanted to.

USB being more or less ubiquitous, as opposed to firewire, is probably the 
reason for so many devices having USB support shoehorned into them.

Thanks for the response.

-- 
Tim Gray
Engineering Sysadmin
ADAC Plastics, Inc.
"Trying to compete with Linux is like nailing jello to a tree." - Jeff Thomas