Hi Folks.

Thought I'd share a little tidbit of experience with you all. Recently I purchased a Vantec NexStar external USB2/Firewire 3.5" HDD enclosure. I had an existing 200GB Seagate Barracuda drive to put in it. Today I assembled the unit and plugged it into my Fedora Core 3 powered Compaq laptop. I was rather pleased to see FC3 detect the device, amend /etc/fstab, mount it, and put a nice little media icon on my desktop with a USB logo on it. It even did so when the HDD was formatted with NTFS. I subsequently deleted the NTFS partition that was on the drive and reformatted with FAT32 so that I can share the device more easily between Windows and Linux machines. I did the partitioning and formatting under Linux as Windows XP (in its infinite wisdom) can not create FAT32 partitions greater than 30GB.

All in all the experience was quite nice. Certainly nicer than my past experiences with USB storage devices under Linux.

Unfortunately when I switched cables to Firewire (IEEE1394) things didn't go so smoothly. The Linux ieee1394 driver can't seem to communicate with the device. Something about being unable to parse the configrom. This isn't the only firewire device that this Laptop hasn't been able to talk to under Linux. So I imagine it is some driver issue with whatever chipset that this laptop has. I've never had much luck with firewire and Linux.

But I don't mind. This laptop has 3 USB 2 ports and USB is "fast enough" for storing my iTunes/iPod music and other backup/archive data.

Regards