Firewire Hard drive ?

[Cremaster]

I have a firewire External Hard drive enclosure that has 2 firewire ports on the back. Can I connect it to two computers at the same time?
Thanks in advance
Cremaster

 

[corkyg]

I don't think so - you would need a KVM switch or something like that. You could burn it up. The second port is for daisy-chaining to another device - Firewire puts out significant voltage and you could have voltage from two computers colliding in one poor fried drive.

 

[phisrow]

There is one minor exception; but it is highly unlikely to be what you want. Some Apple systems(I've seen it done with recent powerbooks, don't know about the others) can be booted in such a way that they will act as firewire hard drives. You could then daisey chain the powerbook, to the drive enclosure, to the main box. Doing this, though, would just give you access to the powerbook's main disk on the primary system, it wouldn't share the drive enclosure.
If you just want to share the drive, I'd recommend the following: connect the two computers with a firewire cable and set up a TCP/IP over firewire connection. Then just share the drive over that network. Overhead will be a touch higher; but it'll work.

 

[Cremaster]

Thanks corkyg and phisrow! I'm glad I asked before trying it.
Cremaster

 

[akira34]

Most likely, with the drive mounted on one system, the other will be blocked from accessing it. Unplug the first system from the drive and you'll be able to get to it from the other. I tried this with two Mac's just a short time ago. With the drive connected to both, it couldn't be used by the second system. Even when dismounting it from the first. I had to unplug the FW cable from the drive that went to the first system in order for the second one to be able to mount it.

As for having the Mac show up as a FireWire drive, that's called Target Disk Mode (hold down the 'T' key on boot). With that, the Mac acts just like a FireWire drive and you can do whatever you want with it.

 

[Cremaster]

Thanks akira34

 

[imported_aten]

Originally posted by: Cremaster
I have a firewire External Hard drive enclosure that has 2 firewire ports on the back. Can I connect it to two computers at the same time?
Thanks in advance
Cremaster

if you could it would be very slow if both computers were trying to reach it at the same time

 

[Cremaster]

Good point aten, thanks.
Cremaster

 

[imported_Tram]

I've heard of people networking two computers by connecting both to a firewire drive. Electronically, there's no reason why it shouldn't work.