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Sharing an IEEE 1394 Device Between Machines?

Posted by Cliff on from the same-question-different-twist dept.

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."

3 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Data Integrity? by iCEBaLM · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  2. also see by rakerman · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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?

  3. Re:EXACTLY what he wants by Kz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    -Kz-