I suspect it depends on the controller. The main problem is that most
firewire or USB drive controllers assume just one computer at a time.
This means they don't build in the capability of taking requests from
more than one interface and queuing up requests from one machine when
the drive is busy doing something for another machine. Lots of potential
to step on each other as well. What happens if both machine see a spot
on the drive is empty so they both start writing to it and updating the
directory with different filenames as being the owner of that spot. NAS
devices already assume multiple concurrent systems and users and so they
have all these checks in place. For example, if you were about to write
a 10MB file to a NAS, that space would be allocated first, then written
so that some other user on another system couldn't come in and overwrite
your file's allocation.
That said, there are firewire devices which are designed to be connected
to multiple computers, like this one:
http://www.sancube.com/
but today with Gb ethernet on most computers, it's just as fast or
faster to access a shared drive that way. So the ideal to me would be to
hook the drive up to your Mac via Firewire 800 (fastest interface) and
the fileshare it out to a Gb Ethernet connection to your PC. Even 100Mb
Ethernet is going to give you 10MB/s. I did a test on GbEthernet and I
think it pegged at 35Mb/s which was the max throughput my drive could do.
CB
VaShaun Jones wrote:
I want the DroBo especially since it just got upgraded to firewire.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jane Lee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X
by theblind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 5:37 AM
Subject: Re: Connecting multiple computers to one hard drive
Hi Alex,
That's not necessarily true. The general term for that is a NAS (network
attached storage), and more devices than the airport networking hardware
from Apple support that type of usage. It ranges from a single hard
drive
NAS device (like the Western Digital MyBook World Edition) to very
expensive
redundant storage like the Drobo with a device called DroboShare (both
together are about $4-700 depending on which model you buy, BEFORE hard
drives!). And if you have a computer to spare, you can set up your
computer
to share that hard drive over the network to others, but that
computer would
have to be on every time you'd want to use it on another.
Also, Apple does sell a single device called Time Capsule that
combines the
Airport networking hardware with a hard drive, but in my opinion it's
sort
of overpriced and inconvenient if the hard drive ever fails.
cheers,
jane
On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 8:09 PM, Alex Jurgensen`
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
Hi,
You could actually share it over the network by attaching it via USB
2.0 to an Airport express, Airport extreeme or one of the computers on
the network. If using the third option, it is possible to use
firewire. I recommend using the airport method. It worked really well
for me.
Thanks for listening,
Alex,
