Sharing an IEEE 1394 Device Between Machines?

groovemaneuver asks: "A question was posted recently regarding sharing a SCSI disk between multiple machines. Firewire was mentioned as an alternative, but there wasn't much elaboration. Is there anyone out there using an IEEE 1394 solution for shared storage between two or more boxes? I've managed to dig up ads for a bunch of enclosures that feature multiple firewire ports, but nothing to indicate that it was possible to connect any of them to multiple machines. The only thing close that I've found was the SANCube, and aside from being fairly pricey (defeating my purpose for using firewire), it is only officially supported as a Mac/Win device."

Comments

Data Integrity?

[iCEBaLM]

That's all I need, two computers with two different ideas of how the filesystem should look performaing simultaneous reads/writes on the same disk fubaring everything. Are you sure this is what you want? Why not just use simple ethernet sharing, NFS/Samba/whatever? I'm thinking it would be a lot more stable.

-- iCEBaLM

Really bad idea

[nocomment]

I remember this discussion from before. This is a horrible idea. Maybe in the future there will be some kind of controller on the firewire drive that lets you d that, but for now, it's just an IDE drive with an adpater. I'd forget about this option until drives get smarter. What is the point of this after all? If a machine is new enough to have firewire, it's new enought to have ethernet.

Networking is a good idead because

It's scalable. as you can add more machines later with minimal fuss

It isn't any slower over ethernet (especially 100Mb and 1000Gb)

LAN parties!!!

easily setup multiple os's to see the drive.

It's a bad idea because

It's not scalabe (easily)

you risk data corruption (even if it works)

the drive can't handle more than 1 operation at a time

it's an IDE drive, therefore the drive handles the rules of IDE, the bus is Firewire, but the adapter handles the rules of that

some os's expect different things out of a filesystem, Windows expects it to be nice and neatly formatted in fat32 or ntfs. Linux expects etx2 or etx3 (or any slew of others) to be formatted in that method. Mac's expect to see a partition table and that's it (that's why formatting a mac hd takes only as long as hitting the "Initialize" button) Therefore it is not an easily cross-platform scalable data-safe method. Use the network option, it isn't noticably slower, it is cross-platform very scalable very data-safe.

also see

[rakerman]

The short answer is, to do this you need both machines to agree on the file locking and such, so they don't trash one another's files. This is not something you get built-in to FireWire, nor into most operating systems.

Also see Ask Slashdot: IEEE1394-based Storage Area Network?

Re:EXACTLY what he wants

[KILNA]

Why not use 4 firewire ports on both machines and have one loop per drive? More cables, but as a bonus you'll get better throughput per disk. I couldn't tell on first glance at the site, does EVMS support software RAID5?

Re:EXACTLY what he wants

[Kz]

To avoid breaking the FireWire chain (not a loop!), just don't make a chain.

Use FireWire hubs to create a more tree- or star- like topology, that way each disk is in it's own branch and unplugging it won't affect the others.