IDE-to-Firewire Device Enclosure
I tend to depend solely on my Sony VAIO (PCG-Z505 JE) laptop for day-to-day computing, even though it is not a good idea from an ergonomic perspective.
There was a time when I used to run a bunch of operating systems on the VAIO (Linux, Solaris, NetBSD and Windows 2000), space constraints compelled me to eventually limit myself to only Red Hat 7.3 on the whole thing.
It's a chore to get all of the hardware on this computer working on Linux, but eventually everything does work, save the Winmodem. The laptop does not come with a CD/DVD drive, and though you can buy external ones, they are very expensive.
I have an assortment of hard disks (both 3.5 and laptop kind), and a couple of CD-ROM drives, which I never use. The hard disks are meant primarily for backing up data. Needless to say, it is a big pain every time I want to read from/write to one of these disks. Sure, there is a plethora of USB and Firewire external storage solutions, but I was looking for something that is not expensive, and readily works with Linux.
The laptop also has a 4-pine iLink (IEEE 1394/Firewire) port, which I decided to put to use after I got the Empeg. IEEE 1394 support is fairly usable in the later 2.4 series Linux kernels.
ADS Technologies makes a number of Firewire and USB enabling "tools". One of the best value for money is the ADS Pyro 1394 Firewire enclosure shown above. This "empty box" can be bought for less than $100 (as of January 2002), and is meant to be connected to a Firewire enabled computer.
The way I use this enclosure is this: any IDE device can be placed inside the container. This includes both 3.5 and 2.5 inch hard disks (for the 2.5 inch drive, a pin converter is required which can be purchased for about $6), all kinds of IDE CD and CD-RW drives, DVD drives and so on.
I needed a 6-pin to 4-pin Firewire cable to connect this to the VAIO. Thereafter, the following kernel modules are required to be loaded on Linux (kernel version 2.4.9):
- ieee1394
- ohci1394
- raw1394
- sbp2
SCSI emulation support is required as well. Assuming everything went fine, you should messages in /var/log/messages indicating that your device was recognized. You might also see the specific SCSI device assigned to this new hardware. Typically it is sda1 (and so on) for hard disks and scd* for CD-ROM drives.