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Share an external drive between 2 comps

C

Colossal53

Junior Member
I have a mac and a friend has a PC, we are both designers and need to share very large files with each other. Is there a way to share an external drive without having to go over ethernet, because of the size of the jobs and the speed constraints?
 
Not really.

Optimized Gigabit Ethernet can be about as fast as most hard drive subsystems overall. Or you can switch to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. It's expensive, but maybe it's worthwhile to you.

Another option is putting the files on one of the two PCs so at least THAT PC has local access.
 
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Either way the information would have to be distributed over the network. Be it wired threw Ethernet or through WiFi. BTW Ethernet won't have any speed constraints other then the max speed of the drive in question.
 
Colossal53 said:
I have a mac and a friend has a PC, we are both designers and need to share very large files with each other. Is there a way to share an external drive without having to go over ethernet, because of the size of the jobs and the speed constraints?
Click to expand...

What kind of external drive? If we're talking about USB 2.0, gigabit Ethernet will laugh at the throughput of the drive.
 
You can usually build for a bit cheaper than you can buy a nas server as well. Or at least get more customization options.
 
O.P.: You never did mention how much storage you need. Both now and two years from now.

Sorry if I'm insulting you with this tidbit, but I remember a small group of designers who called me for help because all their files were on an external USB disk that had RAID 0 inside and had failed and all their data was gone. Whoops.
- Be sure you are backing up your external drive (or internal drive) to somewhere else.
 
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Sorry for the delay. We don't have gigabit ethernet and it would be too expensive to do that right now. As far as storage goes I'd say we'd need round about a terabyte. I would be really nice to be able to access it at the same time.
 
Colossal53 said:
Sorry for the delay. We don't have gigabit ethernet and it would be too expensive to do that right now. As far as storage goes I'd say we'd need round about a terabyte. I would be really nice to be able to access it at the same time.
Click to expand...

Eh?

A Macs have come with GigE for quite a while now. A GigE nic for your PC should run around $10.
 
If you want to access it at the same time, you need to use some form of NAS. No question.

Realistically though, if you need access at the same time: You will spend $200-250 minimum for a cheap NAS + 1TB $40 for two PCI or PCIe gigabit NICs (for desktops) and maybe $60 for a decent used dell/hp switch.

So figure 1TB simultaneous is ~$400.

1TB non-shared you could use external eSATA docks for $50 + $70 for the 1TB drive and spend $150ish. USB would cost about the same, plug into almost anything, but be as slow as heck.

Just as a thought though... if you both need access, time is money. Having to wait for each other, having potential save errors and etc against deadlines, it is easily worth the $230 difference.

As Rebatemonger mentioned, you probably want backup or redundancy at least, so add another $70-100 for a second drive.
 
mfenn said:
Eh?

A Macs have come with GigE for quite a while now. A GigE nic for your PC should run around $10.
Click to expand...

Sorry I didn't say earlier. We work for a company so we're on a network that doesn't have gigabit ethernet, so for my case USB/Firewire is faster than the network. We also don't want to bog down the network, it's not very big. I guess to simplify this whole thing, is there a device that will allow me and my PC friend to hook up an external drive to both computers via USB/Firewire at the same time without worrying about write errors?
 
Colossal53 said:
Sorry I didn't say earlier. We work for a company so we're on a network that doesn't have gigabit ethernet, so for my case USB/Firewire is faster than the network. We also don't want to bog down the network, it's not very big. I guess to simplify this whole thing, is there a device that will allow me and my PC friend to hook up an external drive to both computers via USB/Firewire at the same time without worrying about write errors?
Click to expand...

So you're saying that using an ethernet connection is bad because the shared network where you work is slow? Mind you this has nothing to do with Internet connection speeds if that's what you're thinking, it's simply moving the files via an ethernet connection as opposed to USB or Firewire.

USB and Firewire devices can be limited to slower than the hard drives involved, however a Gigabit ethernet connection should always be limited by the hard drive read/write speeds. Network Attached Storage is just another computer (or just externals sometimes) that'll be accessible to everyone connected to the network and is in no way affected by the network's internet bandwidth, it'll be as fast as your hard drives can keep up with. And a simple way to tack it on independent of your place's existing network, wired or otherwise, is to buy a simple switch and plug in your Mac, your friend's PC and the NAS box.

And you can plug in the external you're using right now into the NAS box to back up or just have more space to work with. The costs aren't too big but as someone mentioned before, it may be more viable to have 1 system host and access all the files locally while the other system is connected to the host.
 
pjkenned said:
If you want to access it at the same time, you need to use some form of NAS. No question.

Realistically though, if you need access at the same time: You will spend $200-250 minimum for a cheap NAS + 1TB $40 for two PCI or PCIe gigabit NICs (for desktops) and maybe $60 for a decent used dell/hp switch.

So figure 1TB simultaneous is ~$400.
Click to expand...

A NAS unit is definitely the way to do it.

However, there are a lot of very cheap NAS drive enclosures - and the problem with cheap is that they are very slow. A $200 NAS enclosure is likely to be intolerably slow (100 Mbit ethernet will be overkill for it).
 
Colossal53 said:
Sorry I didn't say earlier. We work for a company so we're on a network that doesn't have gigabit ethernet, so for my case USB/Firewire is faster than the network. We also don't want to bog down the network, it's not very big.
Click to expand...
You can also up your own gigabit ethernet network just between your two PCs. You'd need a second NIC for each PC. Assuming they are close to each other, you can connect them directly with a CAT5e cable. No need for a gigabit switch.

You'd need to set routing in your PCs to tell them to use the gigabit network for communications to each other and use the company network for everything else.

Then you install an internal shared drive in one PC or attach an eSATA drive to one of them and share the drive.
 
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Colossal53 said:
is there a device that will allow me and my PC friend to hook up an external drive to both computers via USB/Firewire at the same time without worrying about write errors?
Click to expand...

In short, NO. File-sharing over the network, can allow simultanious access, becuase they support locking semantics in the protocol itself. The protocol used by local direct-access storage has no provisions for that. You would corrupt the file or even the filesystem, if you had two agents writing to teh drive at once. Even if one was writing, and the other reading, there's no semantics to indicate that the file block(s) in question were updated.

It just doesn't work that way.
 
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