[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[John Blomfield]

Try this link on USB speed comparisons: 
http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm

John Blomfield

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2007-10-24 06:54-0700 pw wrote:
>
>> Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>>>
>>> That sounds like a good alternative suggestion as well.  Has anybody 
>>> here
>>> had practical experience with this option or the external USB drive 
>>> option
>>> discussed above?
>>
>> I have used all manner of USB and firewire drives with kernels
>> from 2.4 to 2.6. They work fine as long as you are careful to
>> mount and unmount properly, especially with earlier kernels.
>>
>
> Thanks, Peter, for that reply which stimulated some more questions and
> comments.
>
> In practice, is firewire (400Mbps) faster then USB 2.0 (480Mbps) on 
> Linux?
> According to http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm firewire is
> from 16 to 70 per cent faster than USB 2.0 depending on whether read or
> write and on the mix of files that are being accessed.  The reason for 
> this
> higher practical speed is apparently because firewire is just a better
> protocol for dealing with disks.  However, I take this speed 
> comparison with
> a grain of salt because it was most likely done on windows. It would
> definitely be interesting to do some Linux speed comparisons between
> firewire and USB 2.0 for the same drive.  Some of the external drives 
> I saw
> at atic.ca provided connections for both USB 2.0 and firewire interfaces.
>
> Does anybody know if there are some good free tools to do disk 
> benchmarking
> on Linux?  I will want to measure the speed of my internal 500GB drive as
> well as any external drives I might buy.
>
> While looking up Linux and firewire before making this post, I found the
> interesting reference at
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fireboot.html?ca=dgr-lnxw42FireBoot. 
>
> This is a three-year-old article, and I am sure a lot of these details 
> are
> more automated now in Linux, but nevertheless it was nice to see the
> details.
>
> One issue brought up by the article was whether your BIOS would be 
> able to
> boot from firewire devices.  According to the manual for the ASUS 
> P5K-V MB I
> am buying, it does have a firewire capability, but there is no mention of
> firewire devices in the Boot Device Priority menu that is printed with 
> the
> manual so booting from firewire may not be possible with this MB. (That
> certainly still leaves the possibility of using a firewire-connected 
> drive
> strictly for backup without actually trying to boot from it.)
>
> Alan
> __________________________
> Alan W. Irwin
>
> Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and 
> Astronomy,
> University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).
>
> Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state 
> implementation
> for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting 
> software
> package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the 
> Loads of
> Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
> (lbproject.sf.net).
> __________________________
>
> Linux-powered Science
> __________________________
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