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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