Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Amplus · Jun 29, 2006, 10:34 AM

Does an external HD enclosure exist that could be run on a pc and a mac at the same time? I'd like to use my pc as a torrent drone but the files be easily accesable on the mac. No switching wires or any other nonsense. Basically a network drive.

Amplus · Jun 29, 2006, 10:53 AM

http://www.wdnetcenter.com/en/features/

Went and answered my own question when I said "network drive". Anyone have any input on a good network drive to get?

nerd · Jun 29, 2006, 10:32 PM

I personally haven't been happy with one NAS storage drive that I've seen because of speed (or the lack of). But, since this is for your torrents then a NAS box like the one you linked to would work great. These boxes work by providing a file server with the drive. You connect to them via a network share.

Search Newegg and read the reviews to see which ones are the favorites and pick from there.

geraldartman · Jun 30, 2006, 07:36 AM

You can share a fire wire drive with multiple computers, even use fire wire as a direct network without a hub.

Amplus · Jun 30, 2006, 08:55 AM

Originally Posted by geraldartman

You can share a fire wire drive with multiple computers, even use fire wire as a direct network without a hub.

The drive would have to have multiple firewire ports right? Or is there a way to use a hub or something?

krx · Jun 30, 2006, 11:51 AM

Originally Posted by Amplus

http://www.wdnetcenter.com/en/features/

Went and answered my own question when I said "network drive". Anyone have any input on a good network drive to get?

This unit looks good, but a bit pricey for my budget. I too am in the market for a NAS but am pretty daunted by all the mixed reviews... I want one for my home network of 2 iBooks and 1 iMac, mostly to do nightly backups and to make it easy to share stuff. I'm thinking 250GB more or less would be plenty...

Originally Posted by nerd

I personally haven't been happy with one NAS storage drive that I've seen because of speed (or the lack of). But, since this is for your torrents then a NAS box like the one you linked to would work great. These boxes work by providing a file server with the drive. You connect to them via a network share.

Search Newegg and read the reviews to see which ones are the favorites and pick from there.

I couldn't find a way to sort for drives that are Mac compatible on Newegg. Is there a way to do this, or a site that provides reviews for Mac compatible NAS drives?

tooki · Jun 30, 2006, 01:48 PM

Originally Posted by geraldartman

You can share a fire wire drive with multiple computers, even use fire wire as a direct network without a hub.

You must not connect a standard FireWire drive to two machines. You will corrupt the disk and cause data loss.

Only if it's a FireWire SAN device can you do that.

tooki

nerd · Jun 30, 2006, 10:11 PM

Originally Posted by krx

I couldn't find a way to sort for drives that are Mac compatible on Newegg. Is there a way to do this, or a site that provides reviews for Mac compatible NAS drives?

They should all be Mac compatible since you'll be mounting the drives via SMB on your Mac.

krx · Jul 1, 2006, 01:07 PM

I guess what I mean is, if you can get an AFP-based NAS drive why would you want one that uses SMB - especially on a home network w/all Apple computers (don't need PC compatibility)? Isn't AFP superior to SMB in this situation? Or is the difference not that great?

Caveat: I'm completely out of my depth on the whole issue of network protocols so I hope this question makes sense.

nerd · Jul 2, 2006, 12:37 AM

I really don't think the difference will be that big but I don't know the detailed comparisons between the AFP and SMB. I do know at work we save files via SMB all the time because the AFP that's built into Windows 2000 (or was it NT) doesn't support long file names.

The only box I've seen that supports AFP natively is the Intrant boxes but I never found out what AFP version they use. If it's not 3.1 then there is no long file names and you'll have the 2 or 4GB (whatever it was) file limit.

What I did was built an Ubuntu Linux server. I went this route because Netatalk (open source AFP server) supports AFP 3.1 and I also wanted a RAID 5 solution that was fast and that I could grow at a later date.. The Intrant boxes have gigabit ethernet but the reviews I read indicated the fastest you could get was 15-20MB/sec. On my Ubuntu box I get 40-50MB/sec over gigabit writing to a EVMS RAID 5 volume. Insert disclaimer here, this is with a single large file. You won't get this speed with a bunch of little files.

Anyways, I think SMB would be fine. If Netatalk didn't support AFP 3.1 then I would have still built the Linux box but I would have used SMB instead. My situation is a little different though. A growable RAID 5 was my priority, speed next, AFP last.