Firewire Storage

[Circuitsoft]

Does anyone know if I can "bond" two 1394b channels together to get 1600Mbps connectivity to a RAID setup throgh Endpoint?

I want to build an audio workstation with (high-performance) storage in a different room.

Workstation: Dual Opteron w/ 8GB ram and 2x1394b connection to a computer in a sound-protected room.

Mount a CF card as /boot and have that go to a dual 1394b connection for root.

Opinions anyone?

[frostschutz]

Different room? How long will that Firewire cable be? 1m directly through the wall does not sound very practical to me.

How about using Ethernet. You can load-balance over multiple lines. There are tons of tutorials for that on the net - although they are usually for bundling DSL lines for faster internet access or something, it works the same way in the LAN. The main problem would be to get more than one Gigabit card into your computer - they would choke an old-fashioned PCI bus. You'd have to use either onboard or PCI express...

[Circuitsoft]

My reason for Firewire is that since it natively supports DMA, there would be minimal CPU usage for disk access. My concern with ethernet is that I would be using PIO or something related to move the data from the network card into memory buffers, giving me less processor time for audio mixing/effects.

BTW, the computer I would run this on has a dual opteron-1.6, 4GB ram per processor, and several PCI-64 slots. The Firewire800 card I found is a PCI64 card, so it shouldn't bog down too much.

[frostschutz]

[Circuitsoft]

Gigabit ethernet may use DMA, but it's DMA of raw ethernet frames. They have yet to be decoded into TCP/IP streams then further into SCSI commands if using iSCSI. If I used ATAoE that would be ATA/IDE commands directly in Ethernet frames lessening the processor load, but can I do ATAoE on a Trunked ethernet connection?

[Circuitsoft]

Another reason for 1394, See "Disk Storage" on http://ardour.org/requirements.php. Also, I don't plan to use Plug 'n Play, so I won't be replugging anything while the computer is running.

[someguy]

at least no one has said iscsi yet lol
ive been looking into implementing ata over ethernet at work. any good links or docs or anything would be serious appreciated
_________________
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
while [ 1 ] ; do echo "*" | telnet ip.of.print.er 9100 ; done

[someguy]

got it running but dont know how to "export" filesystems with it
_________________
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
while [ 1 ] ; do echo "*" | telnet ip.of.print.er 9100 ; done

[Circuitsoft]

You mean how to export block devices?

The kernel component is only a client/initiator. To act as a server for AoE, you need vblade (currently masked in portage - seems to work, though).