2 Macs, 1 firewire drive

Jump to First Reply
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Can I have two Macs, connected to the same external Firewire drive at the same time.



Seems like an easy way to create a drop box between the two. Haven't tried it yet... any thoughts?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    I would like to know if this workd too...

    You would think that the each computer just sees eachother as a device on the dasiechain... but then again you can network computers via firewire... Hummm... Also I think the firewire drive would have to support two hosts... Hummm... why would you need a drop box when you could just network them anyway... then mount the drive on one Mac and share it across the network... or get a cheap (b/w G3) mac mount the drive inside it, and use it as a NAS device... with the right software it can be done... you could also mount the firewire drive to the NAS-G3 and add some more drives to the NAS-G3... and maybe some more firewire drives to it too... Hell it does not even need to be a b/w... a beige would do fine with a firewire card... or hell just cheap out and get a elcheap-o old win box and put linux and a firewire card in it... set up the NAS and you have got a really cheap "drop box" that will scale really well... you could add as much storage as you need to the box via free IDE channels inside the box and firewire outside... they have these firewire RAID drives now that are sweet... and you can always pop in an IDE controller card for more room to breath... with all the extra storage you could just write some shell scripts to backup the drives in your two macs to the NAS every week or so... and with a setup like that you could give access to the NAS over the net with VPN software... or just tunnel through to your network via ssh and set up a VPN... that way you could get access to your files anywhere and your main macs would not need to be running... just the NAS/firewire drive...
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 2 of 5
    i tried it cause my externals have two firewire ports... never go it to work. the first computer to read it when i plugged it in got to have it. kinda frustrating, cause it seems like a practical thing...
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 3 of 5
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ipodandimac

    i tried it cause my externals have two firewire ports... never go it to work. the first computer to read it when i plugged it in got to have it. kinda frustrating, cause it seems like a practical thing...



    It has two ports so it can be daisy chained to other firewire devices. I'm not really sure than external drive were designed to be used as servers. How about networking the 2 macs together through ethernet? Can the drive than be shared through the network?
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 4 of 5
    no, No, NO



    you cannot have two systems trying to read/write to a drive at the same time!!



    even when a drive is a network volume, there is ONE system (the server) doing all the writing



    when did everyone suddendly go brain-dead about firewire drives around here, anyway??



     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
  • Reply 5 of 5
    Quote:

    when did everyone suddendly go brain-dead about firewire drives around here, anyway??



    Since they started deleting all of our data,
     0Likes 0Dislikes 0Informatives
Sign In or Register to comment.