The Great USB Backup Experiment So Far

[vakkotaur]

The USB enclosure and hard drive arrived a few days ago. I didn't get it in assembled and re-formatted form as the assembly and formatting would be simple, or so I thought. Also, the formating would have been something other than ext3. I was bewildered by the strange requirement in the instructions that the drive had to formatted before being installed in the case with the USB controller - after all, I should be able to reformat the drive once there, so formatting there should be no big deal either. I asked jmaynard and he agreed this seemed to be a silly requirement. The second problem was that the mounting holes on the enclosure did not quite line up with the mounting holes on the drive. I started wondering how it would have been put together if I'd paid for the vendor to assemble things. I had a cynical thought that perhaps there's a pile of parts that don't fit right and those who don't pay the extra fee get stuff from that pile so they have to void a warranty to make anything work. Nevertheless, a bit more disassembly, to keep the controller out of harm's way, and the application of one of the Dremel tools at least rectified the physical mounting problem.

Then I connected the gadget, and my system locked up hard. Worse, it stalled part-way through the POST memory check on the reboot. Disconnecting the USB drive took care of that, but that should not have happened. Fortunately I did spring for the FireWire option so Jay could connect it to the iMac. He had no problem and formatted the drive UFS, since it seemed ext3 wasn't an option. After that, I was able to connect the drive and after some work get it reformatted to ext3. So far, so good... I thought.

Friday evening I decided to finally run a proper backup and started the drive, got it mounted, made a directory on it, and issued the command to copy all of /home to this new directory. It looked like was working, but it would take all night. No problem, I thought, and went to bed while letting things run overnight.

I woke up to a locked up system. It was locked up hard. No trackball response. No keyboard response at all. The monitor didn't switch to displaying. To my amazement, I couldn't get the KVM switch to work - and that should not have been affected.. so likely it had no signal to work with and just sat there. Very strange. Jay couldn't ping the system, either. Checking to make sure the drive lights were showing no activity, I hit the reset switch...

And I got the same annoying power-up lockup as before. Turning off the USB drive, I hit the reset switch again... and the system came up. Then I turned the USB drive on. And found it wouldn't mount.

I suspect the motherboard USB stuff isn't what it should be, or booting with the USB connected and on wouldn't be a problem. The motherboard is an MS-6390 with a VIA chipset - about which I see yakko has something to say regarding the USB controllers. I'm also not sure if Mandrake 9.0 is also a bit screwy, or if it tried to do some sort of power conservation and screwed things up that way. Jay hasn't had trouble with the FireWire stuff (though he hasn't run the thing all night either) and I'm pondering if maybe I ought to see about adding either a USB card or a FireWire card and seeing if that works. Upgrading from Mandrake 9.0 is a good idea, but that's why I bought the drive - to the backup before making such a big change to things.

I could just pull the drive and connect it as an IDE device, defeating much of the point of things, long enough to do a backup before installing Mandrake 10.whatever which would at least be a backup. But I am looking to see if there's something I can do with Mandrake 9.0 first so I can use the thing as I intended. I can live with the need to have the USB drive not on while booting - so long as the rest works and I don't have to reboot.

So far, well, I'm glad I sprung for the FireWire option.

Comments

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

Not only is that motherboard an era from when VIA's chipsets sucked hard, but it's only got USB 1.1 -- no wonder the transfer was going to take all night. Even without the crap regarding the builtin controller, you'll get a significant speed boost getting a USB2 or Firewire controller card put in that board (Firewire is a better way to go than USB2). It'll be a speed boost that you can really feel in terms of performance, as well as probably make your stability problems go away.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I'd thought I'd confirmed that it was USB 2.0 capable, but looking through the boot logs it isn't - it has the 8233A rather than the 8235. So a USB 2.0 or FireWire card seems a reasonable thing - though the current kernel (2.4) is also evidently not USB 2.0 capable.

So now the question is one of finding either a USB 2.0 card or a FireWire 800 card (since standard FireWire is a bit slower than USB 2.0 - even though the drive controller can only do IEEE 1394 [FW400] -- how do you figure FireWire is the better way to go? I know speed isn't everything, so what's the advantage here?) and if they will work for this setup - or if I need to play the IDE game long enough to do an upgrade. I'd planned on taking things a bit more leisurely and trying out other distributions on another box, but now I just want this problem solved and the fastest way seems to be get the additional hardware and go to Mandrake 10.x for now.

[shelbystripes.livejournal.com]

Er.. you want to find a Firewire 400 card. Besides the fact that they're cheaper, FW800 uses a different physical connection than FW400 does; you couldn't plug it in without an adapter. And by the way, when I say cheaper, I mean cheaper; a Firewire PCI card can be had at the local Fry's here for like, $6 every other week on sale. Alternately, NewEgg has them starting at $11 (http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815124015) plus shipping. In contrast, the cheapest FW800 card on the Egg is more than $30. And since your Firewire enclosure (and pretty much all hard drive enclosures and Firewire peripherals for that matter) is FW400, there's no gain in getting an FW800 card.

The advantage with Firewire over USB is CPU utilization. Firewire is a "smart" bus and can manage a connection by itself; it's based on SCSI, if I remember right. Firewire is a smart enough bus that it can even do point-to-point connections without even having a CPU involved; you can hook a camcorder to a DVD recorder with Firewire and copy the video digitally right onto a DVD with no computer as a go-between, for example. On the other hand, USB is a "dumb" bus, and it becomes the CPU's responsibility to manage the connection--so a USB transfer will eat a lot more CPU cycles. Since USB is dumb and you need a CPU to manage every single transaction it makes, it's not possible to hook two USB devices together and do a direct data transfer the way you can with Firewire.

The two protocols get about the same real-world max bandwidth, but Firewire's gonna tie up a lot less of your processing cycles while it's pushing data. It makes a relatively small difference on "modern" systems with 3GHz CPUs that can handle the extra load without breaking a sweat, but the older and slower your system is, the more you'll feel the difference.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

I've had massive trouble with UHCI USB controllers, VIA's in particular.

All my problems were solved when I started getting OHCI controllers (NEC and Lucent have OHCI chipsets, to name two. nVidia's nForce is another). You won't have to worry about this for USB 2.0, as EHCI is much more robust. I have an external USB 2.0 drive working happily as backup drive for the entire internal network. What doesn't get dumped to tape goes there every day.

I've had problems with Firewire under Linux 2.6.x, though. Not sure if those are fixed yet. Lots of bus hangs and stuff. Funny, it worked fine under Linux 2.4.x ... Maybe it was my enclosure that was losing.