Re: dumping large partition to USB drive fails

On 28 Jun 2007, at 9:06 PM, Roland Smith wrote:

On Thu, Jun 28, 2007 at 12:24:15PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
On Thu, Jun 28, 2007 at 08:55:46PM +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
A tip from Paul Mather pointed to problems with USB/firewire chipset,
the PL-3507, which was what I found in my enclosure. Most likely this is
the culprit. I'm going to buy a new enclosure.

Can you provide these details (forward what Paul sent you, etc.)? It
would be nice to have this info somewhere in the archives in case
someone mails about similar...

Here it is;

I don't have your original posting, so I don't know what model of
chipset you have, though I do dimly recall it being a Prolific, which is
why I thought I'd e-mail you. Given that the PL3507 had an early
history of problems when writing to it using large transfers (and that
GELI uses large transfers, IIRC), and you say that enclosure is old, you
might want to see if chipset bugs are the source of your problem.

Here is a link I had bookmarked when I was looking for firmware updates for
the Prolific PL3507:
http://missig.org/julian/blog/2004/06/10/prolific-pl3507-firewire- device/

Here is a link to the corruption issue that plagued various chipsets,
including the Prolific PL3507:
http://www.bustrace.com/delayedwrite/index.htm

My apologies for not doing a "reply all" when responding to Roland initially. As a bit of extra context to the above, a while ago I bought a cheap external FireWire/USB DVD writer for my iBook G4. I was disappointed to discover upon using it that its read performance when using the FireWire interface was much poorer than when using its USB connector. (It annoyed me especially because I had bought something that supported FireWire because I wanted to daisy-chain it with my Western Digital MyBook external hard drive to avoid using up one of the two USB ports on my iBook.)

Because the FireWire and USB performance of my MyBook external hard drive is good, I doubted the problem lay with the iBook, and suspected the enclosure chipset instead. When I began searching the Web for information about the Prolific PL3507 chipset, used in the enclosure, I quickly began discovering horror stories (see above links for a taste). I realised that, if I had my time over and had known this DVD writer's enclosure used that chipset, I would not have bought it and would have looked for something whose enclosure used a different one (e.g., Oxford). I also realised that not all enclosures are created equal, and it's definitely worthwhile to know what chipset it uses beforehand and make sure you avoid the bad ones (like the Prolific). :-)

Somewhat fortunately, revisions B and C of the Prolific PL3507 can have their firmware upgraded via USB. (Unfortunately, Prolific only appear to make a Windows flash writer application available.) It seems that the latest firmware at least appears to correct the worst excesses of the chipset, though people do still seem to harbour mistrust over the hardware and complain of performance problems.

Although I have no plans to buy another enclosure for this DVD writer (because it works "well enough" for the task in hand), I think I would were it housing a hard drive, if nothing else because of the poor performance relative to the WD MyBook.

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
--- Frank Vincent Zappa


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