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SAN or other solution for working from 2 iMacs with the same harddrive
Hi
We are a very small company and are working simultaneously on two iMacs and are searching for a cheap but reliable system for editing from the same harddrive. We har working mainly with HDV.
Do you have any good suggestions for any cheap solutions of this kind?
Thank you very much -
4 Replies
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I am in the same boat. I have two FCP suites (1 MacPro and 1 G5 Tower) and would like to allow them to access my eSata drive and a chain of FW800 drives if possible.
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I just setup a small SAN for Valencia Community College that was absolute minimum cost. This worked. If this is too much money, then just give up now. There is no cheaper solution.
I got a MAC Pro, and stuck 3 internal 1TB drives inside the MAC Pro, all striped RAID 0, so they could share 3TB of drive storage. I also stuck a Small Tree PEG4 card ($669) into this MAC, and tied this card to a Small Tree ES4524D ethernet switch, and configured it for link aggregation. Now, both of their edit rooms share the 3 internal drives in the MAC Pro.
Don’t want to spend $5000 to make this happen – well, just give up. There is no “magic box” that you can plug in multiple edit systems, and have real time video media that is shared between multiple MAC’s. The iMACs work wonderfully as clients for a simple SAN with Apple File Sharing, but if you are looking for an $800 solution, take my advice, and just give up now.
Bob Zelin
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Ok thanks. So there is no way of using an external firewire 800 harddrive that connects to two Macs at the same time?
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yes there is – the way I described. You set up a SERVER (any MAC computer with MAC OS-X 10.5). Turn on file sharing. Plug in the FW800 drive into this “server”. Plug the 2 iMAC’s and this “server” into a gigabit ethernet switch. You are now sharing the FW800 drive.
If you mean – “can’t I just plug a FW800 cable from each iMAC into one drive, and share it” – no !
Bob Zelin
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