Best Way To Share External Hard Drives...

[thomamon]

OK, so let me explain my setup and situation.

In my basement I have my Retina iMac with three external TB LaCie Hard Drives. Two of them are older and one of them is a newer model.

When I am not in my basement at my desk, I have a MBP to use around the rest of the house. I want to be able to access my external drives from my MBP when I am not on the iMac. Currently, have clicked on the drives and set them to share. And if I go to finder and click on "Thomas's iMac" it lists all the drives connected to my iMac.

Now the problem is sometimes I will go to access one of those hard drive and it will say it can not be found and I have no clue why because its listed there. I forgot the exact message now, but its annoying. Normally if I reboot the MBP I can reconnect to the iMac and access the drives.

Is this the best setup for doing this or is there a better way to do this?

My main other problem is for some reason on newest LaCie Hard Drive will sometimes just disconnect from the iMac and I do not know why. I will have to reboot the iMac to get it to reconnect. I thought it was the drive itself and LaCie replace the entire unit, but I have the same issue. Any idea why this would happen?

Thanks!

 

[cincygolfgrrl]

Is your iMac in sleep mode when you try to access the external drives from the MBP? If I try to access my external drives from my MBA when the iMac is sleeping I get an error message. I have no idea why rebooting the MBP would resolve your issue.

Sorry I'm not much help.

 

[thomamon]

Is your iMac in sleep mode when you try to access the external drives from the MBP? If I try to access my external drives from my MBA when the iMac is sleeping I get an error message. I have no idea why rebooting the MBP would resolve your issue.

Sorry I'm not much help.

Thanks for your efforts.

Does nobody else have any clue?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Start with the stupid stuff. Have you tried different TB cables?

 

[thomamon]

Start with the stupid stuff. Have you tried different TB cables?

yeah, even tried an entirely new hard drive, case and cable

 

[cincygolfgrrl]

More troubleshooting thoughts: Do you have the option of going the other way, i.e., connecting the drives to the MBP then attempting to connect with the iMac, to see if it works? Do you have access to another MacBook (friend's)? If it works correctly the issue could be your MBP.