Sharing Firewire Drive with 2 Computers

[mec_modifier]

Hardware Question:

I have an external firewire hard drive I want to share between 2 computers, my laptop which I use for video editing, and the computer with my internal DVD-R drive. At one point I had purchased a 5 port Firewire hub for my laptop, which I no longer use. I was wondering if it would work if I were to connect my firewire drive to the hub and then connect both my computers to the hub, kind of a psuedo "network." I figured I'd check here before I crawled under my desks to navigate my millions of wires.

[808smokey]

Yeah you could do that rather easily with NT OS's like 2000, NT or windows XP. With Win9X is another story. Do it just like you said

I was wondering if it would work if I were to connect my firewire drive to the hub and then connect both my computers to the hub, kind of a psuedo "network."

it would show up in network places as removable storage if i'm not mistaken.

[ofbarea]

Windows Millenium will work also. Firewire networks are faster that 100BT.

Just remember that the HD will be bounted by just one PC, not by the two of them.

[Piccoro]

I always map network drive to have access to a harddrive on another PC on the network at all times as if it is local. Course the other PC has to be on since that is where the files are.

That would be nice if the idea above with the firewire hub would work. Msg back if it does.

[ofbarea]

This works

I have tested this setup without the hub. Basically I connected my desktop PC to the external HD, to my DVD burner and finally to my laptop.

The advantage of using the firewire hub is that I will be able to dismount the HD or DVD burner without losing network connection between both PCs.

The External HD and DVD burner are managed by the desktop. With this setup I'm able to copy files faster than using Ethernet 100BT at full duplex speeds.