Remote Disc via Thunderbolt connection

Question

Remote Disc via Thunderbolt connection

I am trying to share a Mac's DVD drive via Remote Disc. This works nicely over the network (wifi) but I'm not currently in a position to connect via Ethernet and having to transfer 9 (!!!) DVDs worth of data between two machines would take a lot of time. It seems to me that the machines only "see" each other when they are both connected to the same network.

Both Macs have Thunderbolt connections and I have a Thunderbolt cable so that I could connect the two machines.

Can I somehow transfer the data via the cable instead of having to go through the otherwise slow wifi connection?

Thank you in advance.

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Apr 19, 2015 1:35 AM

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Answer 1

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,660 points

Apr 19, 2015 3:41 AM in response to attilagyorffy

Try Target Disk Mode…

How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode - Apple Support

Whatever is mounted on the Mac in TDM should mount on the other.

I think you can also setup networking via Thunderbolt if you configure network preferences correctly at both ends, but it has been a while since I looked at that so you would need to explore that yourself 🙂

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9-brings-fast-but-choppy-thunderbol t-networking/

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Answer 2

Apr 19, 2015 5:56 AM in response to Drew Reece

I just wonder whether this will work between Yosemite and Lion.... Thank you, I will give this one a try.

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Answer 3

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,660 points

Apr 19, 2015 10:40 AM in response to attilagyorffy

It should work OK, it has been a firmware feature of Macs since OS X, I think earlier Macs did it too. The OS should not matter.

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Answer 4

Camelot

Level 9

54,333 points

Apr 19, 2015 10:40 PM in response to attilagyorffy

I'm not sure TDM will work for you here. It's worth trying, but you're trying to mount a DVD, and the TDM technote specifically states:

Target Disk Mode only connects to the master PATA drive on the Ultra ATA bus

In other words, it will mount the boot drive, but not any secondary drives.

In that case, you should still be able to use Thunderbolt (or ethernet - you just need an ethernet cable between the two machines and ethernet cables are usually more easily found than TB cables). You'll need to configure the port via System Preferences -> Network. Ideally you can give each machine it's own IP address in the same subnet (e.g. 10.0.0.1/255.255.255.0 for one machine, and 10.0.0.2/255.255.255.0 for the other).

The trick comes in when you specify the 'remote' machine to grab the disk from - you will need to manually enter the Thunderbolt port address of the other machine, otherwise it will default to using the WiFi connection (or you could disable WiFi entirely for the duration).

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