[ltp] Firewire Drive and 137GB Limit

[Eben King]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004, morpheus wrote:

> Anyway, up until now I had two external firewire enclosures, one with a
> 160GB and one with an 80GB HDD, both enclosures came with the HDD
> preinstalled.  Recently I purchased two new 200GB drives and installed
> them in the enclosures.  The one in the 160GB enclosure works fine, but
> the one in the 80GB enclosure thinks the 200GB drive is 137GBs.

137.x*10^9 B is actually 128*2^30 B or 2^37 B.  Marketroids call 10^9 B a 
"gigabyte", which breeds confusion in the minds of consumers, because it 
doesn't match up with the powers-of-two environment of computing.  (see 
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html )

It is my understanding that your controller does not understand 48-bit 
addressing (only 32-bit), so that limits the maximum addressible size, and 
that the only solution for that is a new controller.  I have not run into 
that problem, because my drives are not that big.

> Now, I've Googled and discovered that older firewire firmware is not
> compatible with ATA-6 and above drives.  Most of the articles cover Macs
> and Windows, I've seen very little on Linux.  However, since Linux sees
> the other 200GB drive, I'm guessing this isn't a Linux issue.

If you switch ports, same issue?  Are both the drives from Maxtor?

> Does anyone know the following:
> 1. How to find out what firewire firmware I have?  lspci only gives the
> firewire controller in the Thinkpad.

/proc/bus/pci/devices may be useful (extremely wide), but I couldn't extract 
the information from Google.

-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar

And we never failed to fail / It was the easiest thing to do -- CSN