If I connect my Drobo to one Mac via USB and to another Mac via Firewire, what happens ?
Tony
bad things
in short: dont
i suspect only one could access it
there is no mechanism for a directly attached device to deal with two differnet computers writing to it at once
its the same issue you would run into with seagate or WD external drievs which have multiple interfaces, they should only ever be attached to one comptuer
Yes, just wondering as I said, no intention of trying it.
However, in concept I can’t see why it couldn’t be implemented such that one of the computers (e.g. the second one attached) had read only access. That could be really useful to me.
Yes, that’s called NAS. Your Drobo isn’t a NAS.
Tony…to do that you’d need intelligence built into the drive firmware (or Drobo) to make it user (or at least computer) aware so as to be able to handle multiple requests from multiple users without having one impact the other. It adds a rather complex layer on top.
Chris…most of the drives I’ve worked with actually turn off one port (e.g. USB) when FW is plugged in. Or they turn off both if both are plugged in. But yes it’s bad juju to try to access a drive designed for a single user from multiple computers.
Even a NAS has restrictions. For example, two people connecting to the same iSCSI LUN at the same time causes lots of interesting (read: bad) things to happen, for example.
Well, I realise that, that’s why I said “conceptually”.
Anyway you’re dead right, that of course is what Droboshare is for.
And the drobo does only see one interface at a time. If both usb and fw are plugged in, it only sees the usb.
Yes but the “concept” adds a lot of complexity for something that is already solved in the Droboshare, FS or a full blown NAS. To do it using local connections would require special drivers on the client end as well as multiple access aware firmware on the drive. Given that USB and FW use very different protocols you would need something to ride on top of that. In the end it’s not much of a win over using IP and Ethernet.