I wanted a fast way to backup and store additional data for my Laptop. Since my Laptop only has USB 1, Firewire sounded good (USB 1 is 12 mbit, my firewire port can run at 400 mbit). So I bought an external drive.

While it appeared to work fine at first, it randomly shuts down sometimes. Forget Prolific-Based solutions. Mine has a Prolific PL3507 chipset, C revision. I also tried newer firmwares that float around the net (while the manufacturer has removed them from his site) - no success.

At first I thought it was either a problem with the WD hard disc, or some idle timeout, but I can rule these two out: A badblocks scan on the drive over IDE did not reveal any problems, and recently the drive disconnected while I was creating a .tar file on it and once while writing a DVD off it.

Being that unreliable, the drive is getting to my nerves…

Error recovery of the Linux ieee1394 stack was also bad - after the drive had gone down once, I needed to reboot the machine to be able to re-add the drive. With the latest drivers from svn, this seems to have improved. Last time the driver restarted the drive in ro mode directly.

I also found a way of working around this: With the fake pci hotplug driver (fakephp, sweet module name ;-) ) I can have the driver reinitialize my ieee1394 controller without a reboot.