On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 09:02, R. Stepanyan wrote: > >> Anyone has any experience with these external cases? > > >I just ordered one a few days ago that should be here next Monday. Mine > >in particular is a firewire one. I'll post my experiences on here. I'm > >going to be using it with a Sony DVD-ROM drive as well as a Plextor > >CD-RW, and possibly a 120GB hard drive. > > Dear Alex. First of all, my excuses for bothering you! > Do you have any results? I mean: does it work? :) > Cannot wait to buy such a thing myself! It works great on my laptop. My desktop is having some issues with the SCSI drivers. I believe it's related to the fact that I have hardware RAID in there, which shows up as a SCSI drive. There's probably some combination of SCSI-related things that I'm not taking into account. But the laptop has worked since the day I got it with no problem. Then again, this is all with firewire, so USB 2.0 may well be easier since USB support seems to be much more mature in Linux than firewire support. Speed-wise, I see no problems so far. I haven't tried using the burner in there yet, but the DVD-ROM drive is working with no problems. I just used it to watch a movie the other day and had no slowdown or stuttering at all. > >Also, in reply to your initial post, all USB 2.0 devices should be able > >to run in USB 1.1 mode, however speed will still be a concern. If this > >is going to be for use on your laptop, and you don't already have a > >firewire or USB 2 port on it, I'd suggest looking at getting some of the > >PCMCIA FireWire and/or USB2 boards. I just did a quick search on > >pricewatch.com and they're showing USB 2.0 only cards for $20 US, and > >USB 2.0/IEEE1394 (FireWire) combo boards for $59 US. > > That's what I'm actually going to do. The main problem is that I don't > quite understand the chain I should build. The weakest part is PCMCIA. How > should I configure such a card. For certainty, I found one on the Net: > > http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2PU2PCCARD > > 2-Port USB 2.0 High Speed CardBus PCMCIA Adapter, only $25.95 > > Could not find any notice about this kind of devices in PCMCIA docs. > I made also a search on google as well as checked linux-usb - without > any real success. > > As what sort of device should pcmcia_cs see such a PCMCIA->USB card? > In other words: which device-driver modules are to be loaded? > > Any ideas? Where I could find docs/HOWTO's/info/etc? > > If I manage to get pcmcia part working, the usb one seems to be more or > less clear. It should not be too different from Flash-card readers, right? I would imagine that any card that is EHCI compliant would work just fine as far as USB 2.0 goes. That's just a guess though since I've never actually used one. I do know that as far as firewire support goes, any card that's OHCI compliant should "just work". Once again, in assuming that firewire and USB 2.0 support are similar in linux, then if the card is EHCI compliant it should just work. If you're intending to buy the card online, just make sure that the place has a good return policy just in case. But that's true for anything you buy of course. I have never actually used any PCMCIA cards in linux, so I don't really know how much help I can be of in regards to any specifics of that. Though I'd imagine that once PCMCIA support was working, the cards that are inserted would show up in an lspci scan. If that is indeed the case, then you should have no problem. I'm using a firewire/usb 2.0 combo PCI board in my desktop with no problems. (Well, except that the drive doesn't work, but as I said, that's a SCSI issue. The actual firewire and USB interfaces both work fine.) Best of luck. -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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