• Storage & Archiving

  Simple setup for 2 macs

  Posted by Alan Langdon on May 2, 2014 at 5:05 pm

  I have a question which might even be too simple for this particular Forum, but on the other hand the expertise found here can probably give me a solid answer.

  I have two new macs, both with 256 GB SSD: macmini late 2013 with 16GB ram, and MacbookPro late 2013 with 8 gb ram (I know, I should have bought it with 16…)

  I am wondering if I can connect both macs to the same hard drive via thunderbolt: I don’t need both computers heavily using the same files, as I am the sole user of these 2 macs, but I would like to avoid swapping the thunderbolt cable each time I want to edit using the other mac. So it would just be like having the drive connected to both computers at once, but only serving one at a time.

  Would this be done simply by connecting the drive to one mac, say the Macmini, and that mac behaving like a server, and the other macbook pro reaching in via Thunderbolt (conected to teh macmini) to use the drive?

  I work usually with within FCP 7.0.3 , manipulating 1080p (2K at most) footage converted to ProRes 422/ProRes HQ, so I don’t need bleeding fast data transmission rates, right? So would the Thunderbolt IP Bridge connection suffice?

  Bob Zelin replied 12 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Bob Zelin

  May 2, 2014 at 11:55 pm

  you will find that Thunderbolt bridging an an Ethernet connection is very inconsistent. But you said you are not trying to do shared storage – you just want to avoid plugging in the cable from computer 1 to computer 2.

  So here is what you do – TRY IT. Splurge, and buy two thunderbolt cables, and plug both of them into your Thunderbolt drive (the good ones have looping Tbolt ports). See if it works !.

  If this does not work, what will work (since you are NOT trying to do shared storage) is to use the thunderbolt port from computer 1 to the Thunderbolt drive, and connect the two computers together via simple Ethernet file sharing. Then computer 1 can in fact be the server for computer 2 IF YOU ARE NOT USING COMPUTER 1 for anything (and it just sits there and acts as a server). You will get 100MB/sec over the 1GbE which is enough for ProRes422 1080i.

  Bob Zelin

  Bob Zelin
  Rescue 1, Inc.
  maxavid@cfl.rr.com

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