Anyone ever connected one hard drive to two computers?
 

Just curious if anyone has ever successfully shared one external hard drive between two PCs... and if so, can they both write to the drive simultaneously?

marc

Doesn't that come under the heading of networking?

I don't believe they write simultaneously but there is a queue system to write and read from the device. You might need one of the PC's to act as a slave but in my office I do have 3 PC's sharing a single external HD. One of the PC's has the software to access the HD (via USB to the master PC) and that drive is shared via Windows to give access to the other PCs.
WG

No, but once I hooked up 5 computers to one floppy. It was pretty amazing.

i believe so...

I believe that wuold be kind of impossible unless your are a MIT graduate going for your phd in electronic engineering.

I'm certainly not talking about sharing a drive via a LAN... I'm more interested in taking advantage of the new Firewire 800 connectivity and faster throughput than a LAN could ever offer.

You must use networking.
 

A drive can be shared by multiple systems that are on a network. The drive can be either internal or external. If you try to share the drive without a network, you will lose your data.

pretty sure they make a firewire network
IP over 1394

firewire 800 is 800mbit
that makes gigabit lan 20% faster
fiber channel can do 2gbps

firewire 800 is new?

ps a harddrive isnt that fast anyways

since when? sata hard drive is 150mbytes/sec, thats 1200mbits/sec

also 300MB/s sata available now too

back on topic.. you want a hard drive with NCQ for your multi user setup mb.

Native Command Queuing

Thanks man :-)

Yeah, the S-ATA interface can transfer that much - but not even the fastest single drives can read/write that much yet..
RAID a few drives and it could be possible to use all that available bandwidth though :upsidedow

Anyone have any experience with this one:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10504

Big and fast.

mb, check out dell powervaults or surfraid triton, nexstor, just compare speed/size options on any fiber raid or scsi raid to a firewire

I haven't and wont even try to.

its called a network :(