However, to those who suggest that this may damage your drive or filesystem, you need to decompose this into what it *really is*:

Namely, the connection of a drive to one machine, and then connecting to the drive to another machine through file-sharing on the other machine. The fact that they are networked over the same firewire daisy-chain is irrelevant.

Remember, firewire is daisy chainable so a number of devices can work fine on the same bus. The 2nd computer connected becomes a client-device on the bus, just like any hard disk or camera, etc.

Using the firewire as a networking medium provides solid throughput and is suitable to the goal of the hint - namely moving files to a single drive from two machines.

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I agree with your basic facts. It is possible via file sharing to move the files in question. But one has to keep his/her wits together. If you make one false move on the machine that should not access the disk, you could still blow up the whole file structure on the disk.

In addition by using file sharing, the data have to go from the second machine to the first machine and then back to the disk drive. In other words, all the data has to traverse the bus twice. A faster and safer alternative is to just connect the drive to one machine at a time.

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Cute:

Speed Limit
Your last comment was 45 seconds ago. This site requires at least 45 seconds between comments

Anyway, your post is FUD. There's not risk of damaging filesystems, and certainly no possibility you could "blow up the whole file structure on the disk", except by the usual means of unplugging a mounted disk. As for your point about bandwidth, this is for people who don't have a spare ethernet cable lying around to do the transfer at 2.5 times the speed of standard firewire.

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So you are telling me that if two machines has the same disk mounted, that changes to the directory structure from one machine will not effect the other machine's view of the disk? The OS caches a lot of info about the directory on a disk to make disk IO more efficient. A machine expects the disk to be left in the state it was in after said machine mounts it and/or makes changes to it. If the second machine makes changes "behind the first machine's back" chaos is bound to ensue. If this weren't the case there would be no reason for all the software and hardware necessary to make XSan possible.

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The point is that you're not actually mounting the drive twice. First you mount the drive itself on one computer. Then that computer is creating a virtual file system (file sharing), which gets mounted on the second computer. It's no different than when you use file sharing to pull up your computer's HD somewhere else, except that here the networking is being done using FW400 cables instead of CAT5/6 cables.

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