External IDE Enclosures

[ViolentGreen 0]

I am looking to get an external hard drive enclosure to store media files on to access from two computers.

 

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-146-172&catalog=92&depa=0

 

This is the one I am considering. I notice that it has two firewire ports in the back. Does this mean that I can have it hooked up to two machines at once? I have never used an external hard drive or enclosure and I just want to make sure I am understanding this correctly.

[jmmijo 1]

No that's for daisy-chaining to other Firewire devices

 

You may want to check out Firewire Depot for other options and bridge-boards that allow up to two drives connected to it

[DosFreak 2]

Make sure that whatever enclosure you get has both USB2/Firewire.

 

Firewire for the speed.

USB for the compatibility with USB1/2 devices since Firewire is rare in desktop PC's.

 

Also you may want to get a Firewire 800 enclosure or if you really want some speed an SATA enclosure.

 

I'm currently strapped for cash so I'm stickin' with my USB2/Firewire400 until I can upgrade from my measly 120/250gb drives to 300gb Maxtors....'cause I'm runnin' out of space...well...I'm pretty much out already.

[jmmijo 1]

Quote:

'cause I'm runnin' out of space...well...I'm pretty much out already.

Hence the reason I'm looking at the Firewire bridgeboards. I have this Super Micro Full Tower case just collecting dust and thought well since I already have firewire I should look into the external cases, however I soon found the bridgeboard option which would allow me to daisy-chain many drives together to add more storage space

[clutch 1]

Strange, I have 2 firewire/USB2 enclosures that are daisy-chained already. On top of that, I hook up my iPod 40GB to the second enclosure, and sync across the whole chain. I am doing all of this with my SB Audigy panel interface's firewire port. What would the bridgeboard offer that I am not doing already? I was under the impression that the standard allowed for daisy-chaining, and the only differences were whether or not you had powered ports and cables to pass juice (4 or 6 pin).

[jmmijo 1]

If you opened up your external Firewire/USB case you would find one of these bridgeboards inside, they basically convert the Firewire and/or USB into a standard IDE interface. So basically the only thing different is that it's cheaper to purchase the bridgeboard(s) without the external case due to the fact you're not paying for the case and the power supply. Since I don't really need any chassis as I'll mount the drives in my extra full tower case and the power will be provided by the supply already inside the case.

 

I'll just use a firewire cable to connect from my Audigy card to said bridgeboard and have at it

[ViolentGreen 0]

I'm not familiar with the term dasiy-chaining. I assume it means hooking up multiple devices together so that it only uses one firewire connection on your computer.

 

From what I understand, bridgeboards do the basicly the same thing for IDE devices, having 2 IDE cables and one Firewire cable. If this is the case, I don't see how that will help me any.

 

Is there any way to have two machine simultaneously hooked up to the same firewire device. I'd even settle for a switch of some sort that I could flip to choose between machines.

[jmmijo 1]

I'm not aware of any external or bridgeboard that would help you out in this case, mainly cause the Firewire port is designed to connect to one computer at a time. If somebody does know a way of doing this then please post the info cause I'd like to know too

 

There is one less convenient way of doing this, you could have two separate firewire cables, one connected to each port on this external device then only connect one cable at a time to each computer or if it's easier to reach, connect only one cable at a time to the external drive.

 

The other thing that occured to me is that XP automatically sets up a firewire network when it detects even a generic firewire port. I wonder if this could be the option you're seeking. Perhaps thru a firewire hub or something like this ;(

[clutch 1]

I haven't seen any reliable way to have multiple machines hooked up to the same disk. Even SANs have this issue, as you really need one virtual disk "presented" to one machine at a time. The machine can, in turn, share out this disk just like any other disk and have it available over the network. This seems to stem from the way the OS handles writes to the disk. When we were testing out SAN setups with Compaq hardware, we could have several machines linked to the same virtual disk. However, when one systems would write a file to the disk, the other machines could not read it. So if SERVERA, SERVERB, and SERVERC were all connected at the same time to the disk, they would only see what was there at the time they were initially setup for the disk and what they wrote themselves (i.e., if there was a text file on there when the disk was first setup to SERVERA, it would see that and every file that SERVERA ever writes to it, but not what SERVERB and SERVERC wrote to it). This was unfortunate, as we were looking to move disk images from all of the servers to the same virtual disk for backup via fibre, but wound up have a single system with the disk mounted and sharing it over the network to all the others. If all of the systems that were mounted to the disk could receive updates when one wrote to it (kinda like in clustering with the heartbeat cable and quorum using a SAN or shared-bus SCSI config) then this would work out pretty well. However, I don't think there's anything right now that would let you do this with consumer-grade hardware.

[ViolentGreen 0]

Well I want to use it between a XP machine and an apple machine and XP doesn't recoginze the "apple device." The more I think about it, I just need a firewire server. I might look into doing that eventually. I guess my best option for now is just to plug and unplug.

[jmmijo 1]

Firewire is hot swap like USB is, it's a pain to do but like you said it's the best option for now