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g3_brandon · Oct 19, 2003, 06:40 PM

I have a PC with several optical drives and hard drives that I would like to connect to my Mac as a sort of Firewire enclosure. I just want my Mac to be able to use the optical drives and hard drives in the PC as if they were simply in a Firewire enclosure attached to the Mac. Any ideas?

jbhopper · Oct 20, 2003, 10:00 AM

Sorry, I don't think that is possible, unless you just share your Mac files to the PC and use it's Apps to burn. Or spend the $140 for a firewire enclosure, rip the Optical drive out and share it with both.

Doesn't you Mac have an optical drive?

g3_brandon · Oct 20, 2003, 08:00 PM

Yes my Mac has an optical drive, its a Dual 2.0GHz G5 with Superdrive. I want to use my PC's 52x CD-RW on my G5 since the internal drive only burns CDs at 16x. Plus it would be something useful for the PC to do other than run SETI@Home.

rlmorel · Oct 20, 2003, 09:56 PM

I am not sure what you are asking.

Do you want to use a Firewire drive interchangably between a PC and Mac? That can be done if you format the Drive as a PC drive.

If you want to just share the disk over the network, you can do that.

I had a another PC at work that had a bad CD drive, so I put the CD in my PC, shared the CD and accessed it from the PC with the bad CD Drive and installed from that drive over the network as if it were local. You can probably do something similar with the Mac.

g3_brandon · Oct 21, 2003, 04:52 PM

I want the PC to act as a Firewire enclosure for a series of IDE devices. Rather than taking the IDE CD-RW drive and putting it in a single drive Firewire enclosure, I want the PC to act as a large Firewire enclosure.

vinster · 05:29 PM

I'm certain you could do this, but you'll need to get a few firewire to IDE converter boards, mount them in the PC and wire up the appropriate connections (basically, you'd be turning the PC into a big enclosure and wouldn't actually be using the CPU/OS to do anything; you could remove the motherboard and expansion cards).

I think you'd be better off putting what you want in an enclosure. I've seen enclosures that can handle more than one drive.

Originally posted by g3_brandon:
I want the PC to act as a Firewire enclosure for a series of IDE devices. Rather than taking the IDE CD-RW drive and putting it in a single drive Firewire enclosure, I want the PC to act as a large Firewire enclosure.

Art Vandelay · Oct 21, 2003, 05:23 PM

Originally posted by g3_brandon:
I want the PC to act as a Firewire enclosure for a series of IDE devices. Rather than taking the IDE CD-RW drive and putting it in a single drive Firewire enclosure, I want the PC to act as a large Firewire enclosure.

PCs don't do that. Even a Mac will only share its internal hard drive when it's in target disk mode.

g3_brandon · Oct 22, 2003, 03:59 PM

Originally posted by vinster:
I'm certain you could do this, but you'll need to get a few firewire to IDE converter boards, mount them in the PC and wire up the appropriate connections (basically, you'd be turning the PC into a big enclosure and wouldn't actually be using the CPU/OS to do anything; you could remove the motherboard and expansion cards).

This is what I was looking for. Thank you for this. I think I'll go for this one. I'll get the one on the bottom with two drives. And since it has two Firewire ports, I should be able to plug it into both machines and have them both access the drives.