I also used firewire mass storage under linux, and found it to be very good with both devices I used. I didn't do a decent throughput comparison between USB2 and Firewire, but I suspect in both cases the single disk was the bottleneck.
I've never gotten Firewire to work. Though I've not tried hard. I actually don't even know how the Linux kernel treats firewire devices. Is it just like USB Storage systems?
One problem with removeable drives under linux is that mounting them in specific places becomes slightly tricky if you have more than one device. Under windows you just get 'next drive letter', which is normally ok. You need fstab entries to have things automounted under linux however, and if your insertion order changes, your device order changes, and so you mount things in the wrong place.
FC3's hotplug/udev support is quite nice. Sure the device order can change but it always mounts the drive in the same place. It uses the filesystem's volume label to name the mount point too. Eg my 200GB drive is always mounted as /media/SWAG as it's VFAT volume label is SWAG.
It's possible it's some combination of your controller and the device itself. It's also possible that the Fedora Core kernels are tracking some changes from the -mm series, which has caused some instability in some specific areas.
Yes it could be any of these things. On the whole, quite annoying. But I survive. Personally I wish we just used Ethernet for everything. At least that works flawlessly. Everything should be connected to the network. Sun's (now cliched) slogan of "The Network is the Computer" makes a lot of sense. Why can't we just turn devices on and they all connect wirelessly to each other. Or just if we're paranoid about wireless security just plug them into the wired network. Ah well, perhaps someday. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com