IDE or USB2 or ...

[ewanrg]

Am getting more than a little tired of my firewire drives getting "lost" under Linux, particularly since two of them are part of a RAID 5 array. When the array gets under heavy usage, it's not uncommon for the drive to "disappear", and then I have to do a lot of power cycles and cord unplug/plugs to get Linux to notice the drive or drives again.

So, I'm trying to figure out what my other options might be.

One thought, since my case has a couple open drive bays, would be to add a PCI-board IDE controller card. But since the motherboard already has built-in controllers, I'm a little concerned whether having 4 channels rather than 2 is going to be recognized.

Also thought that maybe USB2 would be an option, but I can't seem to find much information out there that would tell me if I'm just changing problems rather than fixing them.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

[UgoDeschamps]

I wont be able to help with your problem regarding raid 5 and firewire since I didn't play around enough with this. But As for wether to get USB2 or IDE, Both offers great advantage and inconvinient... If your looking for a nice Drive that you'll be able to bring to customers place with all Driver, Distros, patch, program... then USB is what you need, Speed is REALLY good, I have a NetDisk 120Gb, with Ethernet support, you plug it in the router, and it acts as a shared drive (windows/Linux)...
IDE well the speed will obviously be better, but having to install a PCI controller (*could*) give you a hard time as well with compatibility,, I'dd rather fix your firewire issue instead of taking that option...