Nasty fixes for nasty firewire problems
I have a firewire hard drive that I use as part of a backup process. Every week I copy about 80GB to it. Tyring to do this in Windows completely hosed the drive. I have had similar problems with other FW drives and Windows PCs. I didn’t expect to have the same problem with Linux, but I did. The system log would fill with errors when transferring large files to the drive. I found some good info at linux1394.org. Basically, if I load the driver and tell it to communicate at 200MB/sec instead of the default 400MB/sec it works. Yes, this does degrade performance, but not significantly in this situation. I haven’t figured out how to change/set module parameters at boot time, so right now, after a reboot I do:
modprobe -r sbp2
modprobe sbp2 max_speed=1
