Re: wifi usb adaptor

The message <0cfi23p83r0pv61c3tcnl3nhgivhqapln9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:34:51 +0100, Johnny B Good
<jcs.computers***@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The message <b8vh23dneq99m9cmrfl36a76erqqebcbcr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these
words:

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:42:55 +0100, Johnny B Good
<jcs.computers***@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'd agree that, in general (and in common with firewire), USB is still
a toy interface with absolutely no pedigree whatsoever, never to be
entrusted with 'mission critical' devices (such as keyboards,
networking, and external backup drives, and so on).

I take exception to your mention of keyboards. USB for keyboards may
be a poor idea, but all current alternatives are worse.

What "current" alternatives are there (apart from PS/2)?

PS/2 is it. A lovely standard that allows you to electrically pop your
motherboard if you replug live (though thankfully few keyboards do
that _these_ days), and as a knock-on doesn't support live plug-in.
Fantastically annoying if you've accidentally yanked the cable on a
rack server, let alone a home PC.

Never been a problem for me.

Firewire doesn't seem to have as many problems for storage as USB
does, but that might just be due to lower absolute count of units.

IME, firewire is just as capable of 'making the FS become invisible' as
USB is :-(which is why I now use EXT2 on my large external USB/Firewire
drives instead of NTFS).

http://www.fs-driver.org/ ? You should use EXT3, which actually has
proper journaling. You'll need a Linux VM or something around to fsck
it after an unfortunate event, though.

I simply reboot with knoppix live CD on those rare (but still all too
frequent) occasions when my win2k box fscks up the external drive's FS.
I'd love to use EXT3 but the IFS driver only supports the basic EXT2 FS.
:-(

When I _was_ using NTFS, firewire 400 was around 20% faster than USB2,
but since using EXT2 FS, it seems to be the other way round. There is a
slight drop in speed compared to NTFS over USB2 but a significant drop
over firewire. Since firewire proved to be no more reliable than USB2,
I've stuck with USB.

Frankly, if that sort of thing happens to you often I'm astonished
that you use usb/fw connected storage at all. How about eSATA?

I've got the usb/firewire enclosures and the cooler running PATA drives
already to hand, so don't want to spend any more cash 'upgrading',
especially when it's not entirely clear which part of the hardware
assemblage is responsible. It could be the usb converters in the
enclosures or the VIA chipset flavour of USB2 on the MoBo. Not every
event fscks the file system into doing its disappearing act.

EXT2 doesn't completely cure the weirdness of firewire or USB but at
least I can repair the FS in a little over half an hour with the free
FSCK utility rather than buy one that needs a 7 hour scan followed by
maybe another 7 hours worth copying to another drive I might not
actually have to hand (there are no free NTFS repair solutions that
actually do anything worthwhile).

What are you doing to the poor things that they corrupt so well? I've
always found NTFS to be less fragile than ext2 (it's got better
journaling), but thinking about it that would be under power-outs
rather than sudden live dismounts. Since nothing is harder than a
power-down, perhaps there's something wierd going on for you that
triggers these "going invisible" events and causes corruption too? Is
that across lots of hardware, both host and disk?

Up to now, the unruly behaviour has only occurred with a single system.
I don't have the luxury of time to to tinker with other system boxes to
determine whether it's just common to the drive housings or limited to
my 3 year old VIA chipset MoBo (which I suspect may be the flaky part of
the system).

I can go several weeks between 'funny events', not all of them fscking
the file system (although I need to delete the last file copied before
resuming the remainder of the file copy exercise). At least the use of
Ext2 downgrades the consequences from 'Total Disaster' to 'Minor
Nuisance' which I can live with.

--
Regards, John.

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