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Concerns: Sharing an External Drive

freshform

freshform

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Is there any reason not to have an external drive (shared) on a Mac that's in heavy use (email and lots of Photoshop)?

For example, will it slow down the system due to multi-user file sharing or have slower read/write times for the external drive?

I'm currently using this setup (a Maxtor II 250Gb drive), but with a seldom used PC, so I'm not sure the impact on the system. I've recently purchased a Buffalo Drive Station (1Tb dual drive system) and thinking of avoiding the PC as a part of the network -- if possible.

An all Mac network will make me much happier...
 
The drive station is a USB / Firewire drive, not a NAS, otherwise, that's a good idea. Any suggestions for a good NAS solution?

One thing I did today was test an external drive (a 250Gb LaCie Firewire drive) connected to our PowerMac G5 running Leopard. I had the other two Macs drop in (2) 2Gb files at the same time. While the external drive was saving all the data, we opened up Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator and the system opened the apps at a normal speed.

The drive still wrote relatively fast and the Mac didn't seem to flinch. I monitored the system and all the diagnostics were coming back good. No real impact on the G5, except for a spike in the network activity, the system held up really good.

I'd like to hear results from others using a similar setup...
 
Over what kind of network are you sharing the drive? Is it wireless or ethernet and at what speed is it running?
 
It's over an ethernet network. I think it's all standard cat5 cabling with 100Mbps 10/100 switches.
 
I haven't noticed any issues.

I have an external drive that I use to stream DVD-quality movie content to my Apple TV over wireless-G. While this is happening, there are no noticeable system slowdowns on my mac, even while running large applications like Parallels. Also, the movies stream flawlessly.

configuration: 20" iMac Intel Core Duo, 2ghz, 2gb memory.
 
Like others have said it shouldn't be a problem.

I was just asking for the network type because most common setups can't max out the read/write rate of the hdd anyways (100Mbit Ethernet is one of them).
 
Overall, this sounds like promising news.

I'm going to set up the 1Tb Buffalo Drive Station (2 500Gb drives as a RAID setup) and start using that as the primary shared drive. I'll report the results in a few weeks. Thanks all who posted.
 
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