Firewire Switch?

Question

Firewire Switch?

I have 2 PCs and my imac G5 and wanted to share 3 external firewire drives among them. I would like to do this without plugging and unplugging the drives. I have tried a firewire hub, but it appears that one machine also thinks the other 2 machines are drives. Are hubs just used for one CPU talking to several devices? if so are there firewire switched that allow multiple CPUS to interconnect to multiple firewire drives as with a switch matrix? Thanks.

Posted on Oct 31, 2005 11:01 PM

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Answer 1

MartinR

Level 7

24,354 points

Nov 1, 2005 7:58 AM in response to William Sutton1

Hi William, no you can't connect a firewire drive to 2 computers at the same time, even with a hub, as you have already seen. You are correct that a FW hub is used for one computer to connect to several FW peripherals. I haven't found any 'FW switch' that allows 2+ computers to share FW peripherals. You would need a NAS or SAN device to do that.

What you
i could
do is connect your FW drives to your iMac and share them via a network connection to your PCs.

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