Firewire help: connecting 4 PCs and 5 Lacie 1TB drives with Firewire

[PennyTibz]

Edited: Shorter version:

Is there a way to connect 5 Lacie "bigger disk" hard drives together with 4 computers, using firewire 400 cables and a 10-port firewire switch in the middle, and let them all see each other efficiently?

(deleted the old long, hard to read posting)

 

[cheesehead]

Although it's possible to connect computers via FireWire, it's more efficient to use ethernet. From what I understand, firewire switches are not the world's fastest products; most of the ones I've seen have one or two 400mbps interfaces, and several 100mbps ports. (That said, I've never seen a FireWire switch that big before, either.)
If I were you, I'd just get a fileserver or two, and give them multiple FireWire cards, so as to keep the FireWire interface from being the bottleneck. Alternately, buy an old-ish PC(~1Ghz Athlon, 512mb RAM, 4 IDE channels, and 5 PCI slots), a gigabit ethernet PCI card, and four PCI IDE cards, which retail for about 13$ at geeks.com. Then, buy 12 400GB drives, and wire 'em all up. The PCI bus would slow you down a bit, but it would be a decent way to back things up. And gigabit ethernet is quite fast.

 

[Goosemaster]

The key is to either have management protocols that allow for a hub/switch type enviroment, or to use a single point of data access/sharing

I agree with Cheeseehead that attachign them to a host pc is a good optio.n

 

[War Dog]

Will these be accessed by you only or are they in an office enviro?

I'm betting it's just you as, no harm meant/intended, you ask here
without asking of their handling of open files. At least after the edited
"Shorter version' appeared.

I'll echo the above two posts and add that if you haven't purchased these yet consider ones with ethernet, and driver free. That is unless you have the need to daisy-chain a DV camera to one or more of 'em.




They're nice in that they're driver free, they'll let ya choose your FS format, and they don't use some blasted proprietary UNIX based FS.

But dang LaCie. Firewire and USB, but no ethernet? It's for that reason I overlooked 'em and bought three Linksys EFG250 rev.2 gigabit devices and added a 2nd MaxLine II 250Gb to each.

 

[PennyTibz]

^^^ bump ^^^

Thanks for the input guys...I wouldn't mind some more input. I am thinking now that I will likely hook up the lacie drives to the one computer from where I do most of the transfering. The other 2 machines only need to simply have access to the Lacie drives, via ethernet or Firewire.

All in all, I like having the host PC idea over the ethernet idea, mainly because of cost and speed. Ethernet might look more pretty and be easier to setup, but it costs much more and I don't think it would be as fast as having the lacie drives on a host PC.

So it looks like what I'm gonna have to do is hook up (2) 3-port PCI firewire cards (or a single 5-port if they make one?) to that computer...the problem is, there are no free PCI slots...hehehe. I guess I will just have to figure this out somehow...I might have to buy a whole new computer w/ more slots.

Wouldn't it be faster though, to do this:

1) Get all 3 of the machines on gigabit ethernet, with a fast gigabit switch.
2) Install the PCI firewire cards on the main machine that does all the transfering, and hook up the Lacie drives to the machine.
3) Also hook up all 3 of the machines to each other via Firewire as well via a firewire hub in the middle. This would give both firewire speed + the added gigabit ethernet speed. I can't see how this would be slower than just having the gigabit ethernet by itself? Gigabit ethernet + firewire connectivity via a firewire hub should (at least together) be almost as fast as a PCI --> Firewire device direct connection, right?

re: War Dog: I am the only one using these machines.

The reason why I don't want the ethernet ones are because they cost twice as much! It will cost me a little over $3k to get the 5 lacie drives, but to get these in ethernet external drives it is about $6k...way over my budget.

Do the Lacie drives use a proprietary file system? I didn't know about this...I thought you could just format them in NTFS or Fat32? I was told by a friend who uses these for storing videos for movies he edits...that a Lacie drive is actually just hitachi (or other branded) drives in a nice case...is this true also?

Oh ya another idea...is there any cheaper / more efficient way of having 5TB of storage space, besides using a big RAID setup w/ 400gb drives? I don't like the RAID idea because if one of the drives fails, it is possible to lose ALL of the data from the entire RAID.

 

[skyking]

The cost factor seems prohibitive, when compared to a fileserver with hot-swap drives. Have you considered that? Do you absolutely need the portability of the lacie?

 

[nweaver]

blasted propriatary unix FS huh.....lmao