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Just getting started on this. I'm going to slowly update this page as I have consistent success with my configuration.

Short summary:

1. The ADS USB2.0/1394 case does work. I had another cheaper unit that was nothing but trouble. A friend brought his WinNT drive in a different enclosure over today and plugged it into the same Linux system and we had nothing but trouble with it, constant stream of I/O errors.

   This is the one I bought:
   http://store.yahoo.com/pcsound/840971.html
   

   The StorTecc PM-350U2-LCS also works and is more compact, but will only hold a regular sized 3.5" hard drive.

   This is the one I bought:
   http://www.dealsonic.com/stalidetousb.html
   

2. Choose a good USB 2.0 card. I picked up a StarTech USB 2.0 from the local MicroCenter. I figured if it doesn't work I could just take it back and try another one. I've been told many times to be sure to stay away from VIA chipsets. This is how this card comes up in lspci:
   

   00:0c.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
   00:0c.1 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
   00:0c.2 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
   00:0c.3 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 2.0 Controller (rev 01)
   

   Strangely I had another USB2.0/1394 card from OrangeMicro (also recommended by other Linux users) that I had a lot trouble with.
   
3. Use Fedora or anything with at least a 2.4.22 kernel. The system is FAR more stable with 2.4.22 than it ever was with RH9's 2.4.20 kernel. With USB 2.0 it would occasionally lock the machine hard when backing up a fast machine over the network. For a while I went back to the motherboard's USB 1.1 ports to slow down the backup. That at least kept it from crashing but the load average would get very high. I'm using USB 2.0 reliably now with hardly any noticeable load on the backup machine.
4. I'm using this all currently with a 250G drive. I have several large drives (160G, 200G and now 250G) that are in easy swap carriers that go into the ADS case.
5. Turn on the enclosure and plug it into your system. Something resembling the following should appear in your /var/log/messages :

   ... kernel: hub.c: new USB device 00:0c.3-3, assigned address 2
   ... kernel: scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
   ... kernel:   Vendor: WDC WD25  Model: 00JB-32FUA0       Rev:  0 0
   ... kernel:   Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
   ... kernel: Attached scsi disk sdd at scsi2, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
   ... kernel: SCSI device sdd: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
   ... kernel:  sdd: sdd2
   

   In this example you can see the hard drive is already formatted because it shows my existing partition sdd2 . If your drive isn't partitioned use fdisk /dev/sdX  to partition the drive in whatever way makes sense to you.
6. In my case these drives are being used for backups where there will only be multi-gigabyte files on the drive so I created the ext3 file system with the the command line:

   mkfs.ext3 -j -m 0 -T largefile4 /dev/sdd2
   

   The meaning of all the options are:

   -j	- Create the filesystem with the ext3 journal
   -m 0	- Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks reserved for the super-user. I set this to 0 because only root will write to this filesystem.
   -T largefile4	- Use one inode per 4 megabytes, more efficient for very large files.

   Please note: There is a bug in the Fedora Core 1 version of mkfs.ext3  which causes it to core dump with the -T largefile4  option. There is a fixed e2fsprogs  RPM at http://people.redhat.com/laroche/. which fixes the problem. More info about this bug is in Bugzilla Bug# 113150.
7. One thing to remember when hot swapping drives is that there is a problem with the Mass Storage driver not clearing out partitioning information from within the kernel when swapping different geometry drives. This doesn't always make itself evident right away but will result in flaky operation or what look like drive errors. The solution to the problem is after removing one drive be sure to tell the kernel to eject the drive before installing a different drive. This also applies to Compact Flash memory devices. For example, if your device comes up on /dev/sdd  do this:

   # umount /dev/sdd1
   # eject /dev/sdd
   # mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/XXXXX
   

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