Firewire NAS

[Marshall]

Hi all,

I'm wanting to connect two apple imacs to a central storage with Raid 1, and I'm wanting to use Firewire 800. Are the any other devices apart from Western Digitals My Book Studio Edition II that have 2 Firewire ports so you can share the drive?

Thanks
Marshall

 

[thiggins]

None that I know of. Why use FW800 instead of Ethernet?

 

[Marshall]

Reason for firewire is I'm moving my business back home.
The room we will be work out of is small, and we dont want to have a switch , and ethernet cables everywhere.

Currently our office at work has a Gigabit switch, IBM server and ethernet wired along the walls. We don't have room for the server at home we are looking for a NAS that either can connect by USB 2.0 or Wirefire.
We do Graphic and Web design work, so I can't see USB or Firewire been a problem sharing a drive, has our files are never really that big.

So far it looks like either My Book Studio Edition II or the Freeagent for Mac I think this has two USB 2.0 ports.
I'm just hoping you can share these drives like a NAS with 2 Macs, Im not 100% sure, to share a drive I might just have to use a switch and ethernet.

Kind regards
Marshall

 

[drbiggly]

With firewire, it might work. But with USB 2.0, I know that any time I have attempted to connect two different systems' USB ports together, it just shuts both of the USB subsystems down, making them inoperable. (NOTE: This may not be the case for you or even all systems, but for the limited number of times I have tried it, there were no good results. YMMV.) Of course you know that this won't happen with ethernet, but the goal is trying to avoid it. If I were you, I would make quite sure that whatever you end up trying comes from somewhere with a fairly generous return policy.

-Biggly

 

[thiggins]

What you are describing is not a NAS, but attached storage. Multiple USB ports on a device does not mean that it supports multiple hosts.

You would be better served by buying a real NAS and small switch.

 

[Marshall]

What you are describing is not a NAS, but attached storage. Multiple USB ports on a device does not mean that it supports multiple hosts.

You would be better served by buying a real NAS and small switch.

We have decided the cheapest option for us is to keep our Server but disable the MS Exchange and just use POP3 for our email.
The Server has RAID 1, Tape Drive Backup and External Hard Drive Backup.
We'll also keep our Switch, its a 16 port gigabit switch which we needed at our old office, but why spend more money.
Reason for keeping the Server is, it may be big but to find a NAS with the same features is just to expensive, we have spent money to have a server, Software and maintenance.
We just though maybe we could replace the server and avoid IT Maintenance costs and software subscriptions for server antivirus.

Thank you to all that replied

 

[corndog]

Hi Marshall,

Even with two firewire ports on your DAS device, you still can't share it between two computers. The two firewire ports are for daisy-chaining multiple devices on ONE computer. Not for sharing between two.

I have tried this - basically you can't predict which computer will "own" the firewire drive, and the other computer won't see the drive at all, and you could corrupt your data. You would need a clustering file system (much more expensive than a NAS) to share a DAS between two computers without corrupting. And even that would only work if you have a DAS that properly supports clustering (also very expensive)

Be CAREFUL with these plans - you risk losing your data!

 

[germ]

Marshall,
as Tim and corndog already said, you *cannot* connect two iMacs to a single external Firewire drive.

However, you *can* connect it to one of the iMacs, then enable File Sharing in the Sharing preferences, and connect from the second computer to the first (via ethernet or wirelessly. The former is you want better performance). I am doing this right now and it works.

 

[Marshall]

Hi,
I'm not using Fireware or a NAS. I have decided to stick with our IBM Server.
We have a professional setup in our office that was planned, purchase and setup by a Professional IT company. We paid over $12000 for the complete setup. So we have decided to keep on using the setup we have and keep on just paying on going costs for maintening the server and our network.

Thanks
Marshall