Comments

Former user wrote on 4/14/2004, 2:44 PM
I firewired two computers together. Wolrked, but not real stable. Seemed to crash rather easily.

Now I just use an ethernet crossover cable and hook them through a network card.

Dave T2
Rogueone wrote on 4/14/2004, 2:45 PM
Never tried it, however it's supposed to be blazing fast compared to even 100 base network. Two reasons I've never tried it are:
1) Never had a 2nd PC close enough to link with a firewire cable
2) The PC that was close enough didn't have firewire

As for safe, I see absolutely no reason why it wouldn't be safe. It's the same as connecting to a network, except it's faster than most networks.

Hope this is useful!

Ben
Cheno wrote on 4/14/2004, 2:51 PM
Since I really don't need anything that's on the other computer.. all of my media's on the hard drives... it's great. Seems to work fine.
rmack350 wrote on 4/14/2004, 5:37 PM
You're saying you've tried this. With the drive in the center between two PCs?

I was pretty sure this wouldn't work since you'd have two machines trying to control the bus.

Whadaya know?

Rob Mack
BrianStanding wrote on 4/14/2004, 8:01 PM
Keep in mind that firewire carries power, not just data. I fried my ADS Pyro card, and my ADS firewire hard disk when powering up two computers connected via firewire. I mean FRIED... like they never worked again.

My advice: only connect firewire to firewire AFTER the machines are running.
Or, better yet, buy two gigabit network cards and a crossover cable. The cards are only $25 apiece these days.
Cheno wrote on 4/14/2004, 10:02 PM
After about an hour.. I lost the drive.. not kaput but it removed itself... was worth a shot, so back to the regular networking...

mike
RBartlett wrote on 4/15/2004, 12:43 AM
Whilst you can join two PCs together, even with firewire. Having a slave storage class device on this common bus is not achievable with a plug and play OS. Both machines try to control the hard disc in its entirety, in which ever way you may have tried to partition the device (you probably didn't and in fact shouldn't).

Thing is networking is about sharing. Disc I/O protocols are about sectors, clusters and blocks. There is nothing about sharing. It'd make the same amount of sense to join the IDE/SATA cable to two controllers.

SCSI and Fibre Channel SANs carve up the storage device or cluster into the equivalent of separately addressed storage and permit a single host onto each addressable unit. If there is any sharing to do, this goes across the peer to peer network (be it gig-eth etc) and uses a network filesystem (Microsoft networking, NETBios, NFS etc). This way files can be locked or individual parts of a file can be adjusted without contention.

So to do a firewire network that contains a firewire storage class device. You need to have at least 2 firewire cards on at least one of the PCs (one networking bus and a storage bus). In windows, you then share the volume to the remote peer. The result is that both PCs have to labour to deliver data to the remote PC. However the bandwidth of the PCI32 bus is enough to handle this requirement. Especially for one or two DV streams, disc access times permitting.

So Gig-eth, especially if served on a motherboard with i875 CSA or E7505 multiple PCI buses is more appropriate than using firewire400 or 800. You'll save money on the cables and you'll probably never need a repeater for GiGE either. A third PC with a Gig-E switch is also reasonable to do without even more firewire bus controllers. Perhaps you'd increase the IP MTU to encourage the GigE connection to deliver giant ethernet frames for payload effeciency, NIC card spec permitting.

I use firewire networking (FireNet) on Win2k. I use a firewire hub to isolate the power lines to prevent the 6-pin sources from burning eachother out. However if I need to turn on my firewire storage device, I turn off or disable the dormant PCs firewire connection.

I wouldn't put the storage class device in the middle even if I was only reading from the store.

1000BaseT may well be the best path ahead if data storage and video storage keep getting more intelligent.