File Sharing

[Jeff Carpenter]

I don’t think there’s a way to use firewire that way. Maybe there is, but I’ve never heard of it.

I have several firewire drives hooked up to one Mac with 2 other Macs connected over gigabit ethernet. They have no trouble accessing the drives and the connecetion is very fast. You just have to make sure your maintain the gigabit speed…that all the routers, hubs, and ethernet jacks are up to that standard.

[Bill Lee]

What would be the best way to setup daisy chained firewire drives and have them simulataneously accesible from 2 to three Macs. Is there a firewire solution?

There is no best way to do what you ask with FireWire, since I woud not recommended FireWire-based drives in this case.

Apple brought out XSan for a reason, and the principle reason was to do as you describe.

The problem with Firewire drives is, although they use peer-to-peer communications (unlike USB) the headers for the drives are used and cached by only one of the computers that is attached to them, to prevent two computers writing to the same location at the same time, and corrupting the disk structures as well as the data on the drive. The last computer that wrote to this drive would be the winner, but that is likely to irrevocably damage whatever you are trying to work with.

There are alternatives to Xsan, that use the computers that are part of that SAN to manage the co-ordination of whose computer it is to write to a disk while all others can read-only.

The reason I say that FireWire disks are not recommended is that they have slow read/write times, quite unsuitable for multiple access due to their IDE-FireWire or SATA-FireWire electronics which limits their speed. OK for plug-and-play direct connect, not so good for fast speeds. Example: I get about 9MB/sec from my FireWire 400 drives, and about 18MB/sec doing Finder copies. I was getting above 45MB/sec with inbuilt SATA drives.

One other possibility is a NAS or a file server on 1Gbit Ethernet, but I haven’t played with any that are fast enough for reliable multi-user access.

Bill Lee