Sharing an external drive between 2 laptops?
Can anyone think of a reason that this wont work:
Looks like a cheap way to share 1 drive between 2 lappys - save uplugging theusb cable all the time…
if i´m not mistaking this is a switch. means that you can only operate one modul at the time.
(No, looks like a hub that connects 4 USB ins to 1 USB out) - My bad, sorry yes, that’s a switch
…my wife and I could use that for our printer. Not sure how the printer and driver would know when the printer is talking to them…think it could get confused no? AS for using it to share disk drives, I think you would discover very early on that either it simply won’t allow two machines to read a once, or more frightening, as soon as you plugin laptop 2 in, the drive gets corrupted. If you want to share drives you need a NAS or a SAN.
maybe be ok if you can mount the drive read-only on one laptop - but that defeats the point i guess. that’s what i’ve done before tho for a high availability server setup (tho with a fibre channel raid as the backend - only mounted read/write by one server at a time)
why not just share over your network from one computer to the other?
I’ve got 2 laptops - one is for surfing the web and audio production (dual boot) and t’other is my DJ rig - completely stripped down with nothing that is not necessary for audio removed.
I only want to use the external drive with 1 machine at a time (and it would only need to be read only on the DJ rig), but want to avoid plugging and un-plugging it every time I want to switch it over. Wear and tear on teh USB connections is something I’ve experienced a bit because of this…
A switching box seems perfect. I assume I’d need to stop the drive (in the tool bar USB section) BEFORE I flick the switch on the unit?