[wellylug] DSE ieee1394 external hard drive operation problems

[Damon Lynch]

Hi,

Does anyone have any experience with the DSE 3.5" Drive Case USB 2.0 and
Firewire (an external hard drive case) and linux?  DSE says it works
with Linux.  I can get Mandrake's 2.4.22 kernel to recognise and mount
the drive, but actually transferring files can be very slow, due to the
system appearing to periodically freeze for a time.  And it appears that
reliability is not as strong as one would like.  

dmesg has a lot of output like this:

ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
Write (10) 00 11 14 48 f7 00 00 f8 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
Test Unit Ready 00 00 00 00 00
ieee1394: sbp2: reset requested
ieee1394: sbp2: Generating sbp2 fetch agent reset
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
Write (10) 00 00 00 24 b7 00 00 f8 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command
Write (10) 00 0a 31 7d 9f 00 00 f8 00
ieee1394: sbp2: aborting sbp2 command

....

till finally this:

Write (10) 00 11 c9 b0 47 00 00 18 00
I/O error: dev 08:01, sector 4178577736
journal_bmap_R9e635429: journal block not found at offset 3528 on
sd(8,1)
Aborting journal on device sd(8,1).
ext3_abort called.
EXT3-fs abort (device sd(8,1)): ext3_journal_start: Detected aborted
journal
Remounting filesystem read-only
EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,1)) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
EXT3-fs error (device sd(8,1)) in start_transaction: Journal has aborted
...

I've connected the unit to an nforce2 chipset.  I think the DSE unit
uses a Genesys chipset.  I noted on the linux ieee 1394 website,
http://www.linux1394.org/view_device.php?id=650 , that a user said a
model with perhaps a similar chipset said "Has performance issues in
copying big files if sbp2 is loaded without "sbp2_serialize_io=1".  How
do I make this 1, instead of the default of 0?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Damon