Firewire drives

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, 2004-02-24 at 17:52, Michael Ault wrote:
> I have attempted to use ACOM and Western Digital
> firewire drives on my new cluster. They need to be
> able to accept multiple logins. The Old 80 gig western
> digital works fine. The new 120 gig doesn't. The
> oxford911 chipset is used in the wd drive.
>  
> The oxford911 I thought was supposed to work with a
> shared connection. I can connect with one system, but
> the other reports that the drive is telling it that it
> has 37 million connections (or whatever the max value
> is for big integer) and refuses a second connection.
> Has the microcode been altered since the 80 gig drive?
> Is there any way to patch this so it will accept
> multiple connections?

Mike,
   I *believe* that on the 911 the microcode is not internal to the chip
but rather is held in an on-board eeprom. If you look on page 2 of this
document, in the bottom left, you'll spot a section labeled EEPROM
interface.

http://www.oxsemi.co.uk/download/standard/oview/fw911ov.pdf

   I do think that the drive cases are possibly upgradable. From memory
there was some discussion on the Linux 1394 lists maybe a year or more
ago when drives larger than 137GB came out and they were not all
working. (People could only see 137 of a 250GB drive) If I remember
correctly someone from Oxford chimed in that there were some firmware
patches that *possibly* allowed certain drive boxes to support these
larger drives. Logically then there may be firmware patches thatwould
enable multiple logins as you need.

   Unfortunately I don't have a clue where you'd get them unless WD will
pony them up for you.

With best regards,
Mark