MrPete
Occasional Visitor
(This is a chain of questions leading to the interesting possibility of a fully redundant FW-based network fileserver using Mac Mini's)
1) Firewire supports multiple drives (obviously)
2) Firewire supports multiple hosts, both according to protocol specs, and noticing that Firewire-IP is supported on OS X (for IP failover)
So I'm wondering...
a) If I connect three FW drives Da, Db and Ds to host A, how hard to permanently identify them as such (so host A knows for sure which is which)
b) If I connect two hosts A and B, and two FW drives Da and Db all on the same FW "bus", how hard to ensure A talks with Da while ignoring Db, B talks with Db while ignoring Da?
c) If I add drive Ds to scenario (b), as long as only one host at a time mounts Ds, shouldn't it work?
d) Is there any reason why IP-over-FW can't work simultaneously with drive-access over FW?
If there are solutions to the above four questions, then I'm thinking:
- Two Mac Mini's, each with high speed RAID 1 Firewire drive as main drive (better and more reliable than the internal drive)
- IP Failover using Firewire and Gigabit ethernet
- Shared RAID 5 drive on the Firewire bus (less overhead than gigabit, and leaves the Gigabit for client computing
This gives me an amazing, high performance, fully redundant, file server.
How crazy is this?
Thanks for any thoughts and feedback!
(My first post here BTW... nice forum community!)
--Pete
1) Firewire supports multiple drives (obviously)
2) Firewire supports multiple hosts, both according to protocol specs, and noticing that Firewire-IP is supported on OS X (for IP failover)
So I'm wondering...
a) If I connect three FW drives Da, Db and Ds to host A, how hard to permanently identify them as such (so host A knows for sure which is which)
b) If I connect two hosts A and B, and two FW drives Da and Db all on the same FW "bus", how hard to ensure A talks with Da while ignoring Db, B talks with Db while ignoring Da?
c) If I add drive Ds to scenario (b), as long as only one host at a time mounts Ds, shouldn't it work?
d) Is there any reason why IP-over-FW can't work simultaneously with drive-access over FW?
If there are solutions to the above four questions, then I'm thinking:
- Two Mac Mini's, each with high speed RAID 1 Firewire drive as main drive (better and more reliable than the internal drive)
- IP Failover using Firewire and Gigabit ethernet
- Shared RAID 5 drive on the Firewire bus (less overhead than gigabit, and leaves the Gigabit for client computing
This gives me an amazing, high performance, fully redundant, file server.
How crazy is this?
Thanks for any thoughts and feedback!
(My first post here BTW... nice forum community!)
--Pete
