Access external drives through ethernet

[amstrad]

Hello everyone,

I would like to know if it is possible to link external drives to a mac through the ethernet port instead of the usb one.

I have many external drives and while firewire transfer rates are ok, usb sucks.

So i thought maybe there is a way to plug these drives through an ethernet interface instead of the usb.

Thanks

ps : if that's possible, would i be able to boot windows from an external drive instead of partitioning my main imac hard drive ?

 

[dubAdub]

What you're looking for is called a NAS (Network Attached Storage). It's possible to buy just the NAS enclosures and put the disks in yourself. Obviously the disks have to be compatible with the enclosure.

It's possible to get Network booting Mac OS working with NetBoot and a Max OS X server http://www.anandtech.com/show/4547/mac-os-x-lion-server-review/16.
I haven't tried it myself so don't know if it will only work with Mac OS X server due to any proprietary extensions Apple have put into the discovery/boot process. Those might prevent Windows network booting.