1 External HD for 2 Macs?

[CrEsTo]

I'm about to buy an external HD (500GBwith 2 FW400) for my iMac and MBP.

1) I do a lot of DVD ripping/encoding at the same time on both macs, is it possible to write on the HD the output of the 2 Machines at the same time? If yes, how fast would it be?

2) Can I store my iTunes/iPhoto library on the External HD and just link from the computers?

Thanks!

 

[iMeowbot]

You can't really plug two computers into one drive, one of them has to have control over the filesystem.

What you can do is share the drive over your LAN so that the other computer can use it. How fast this will be depends on the computer that's directly attached to the drive, and the speed of your network connection. Use a regular Ethernet LAN for this, IP and external drives on the same FireWire bus don't really work together.

Yes, you can keep iTunes and iPhoto libraries in external or networked folders.