External HD Dual Firewire Connected (PC + MAC)

[Ramonzuton]

Hi there,

I've got a Western Digital Studio 750 GB External Harddrive with two FW800 ports, usb and esata...

The drive is meant for the storage of a PC desktop (with xp) and my MBP (10.5)...

Now I've read some stuff about using a firewire drive as a network drive so I was wondering if it would be possible to connect one FW800 port to my mac, the other to the pc and just make it possible to read and write to the drive from both systems in one way or the other...


Thanks!

 

[bplein]

The short answer is NO.

Longer answer: Host operating systems don't know (unless you are running special clustering software!) that they are sharing a drive. So they each cache/buffer their "view" of the filesystem to a certain extent.

Imagine the Windows box sees an empty disk. As does the Mac. Now, each one goes to create a file. They write it whereever their filesystem says is open. They may very well collide and write over the same space. They don't "lock" anything (as a cluster would be required to do) because they both think they own the whole disk.

File corruption WILL occur. Trust me.

You can disconnect the disk and move it back and forth. Or you can connect it to one host only, and share it out with SMB to the other host. That's about it in your case.

 

[Consultant]

No, you will probably kill the firewire chip in the external drive.

Any reason you can't share it over gigabit ethernet network?