hooking an external hard drive up to both a mac and a pc

[jrm27]

Hi all...

Basic dumb question. My buddy has both a pc and a mac at work. He has music spread across both of them. What he'd like to do is colelct all his media files and put them on one external hard drive, then be able to connect both his PC and his MBP to the hardrive to access his music.

What would be the best way to do this? Is there something exceedingly simple like a hard drive with two USB outs that could feed both computers at the same time?

-jon

 

[Pillar]

did you try helping yourself out first via this lovely option that is well written below?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/525637/

the short time i've been here, i've seen similar questions asked many of times.

 

[old-wiz]

No simple external disk drive can be connected to two computers at the same time. The two computers could both modify the same data at the same time and corrupt the disk and make a terrible mess.

 

[SDub90]

Get a network drive or connect an external to 1 computer and share that drive over the network.

 

[ActionableMango]

No simple method like that exists that I am aware of. Probably the closest would be a USB switcher that allows the drive to be connected to one computer at a time, but easily switched with a simple button.

Next easiest method is to keep a copy of all your music on both. This is probably ideal because then you have all your media even when you are on the go with the MBP.

Next easiest method, if your router has a USB port and supports it, is to connect a USB drive to your router and connect to it with both computers.

Next easiest method is to buy an external hard drive with Ethernet port (network attached storage) and connect to it with both computers.

Lastly, you can simply keep it connected to one computer and use file sharing, but that computer has to be on all the time.

All of the network examples may require you to figure out how to file share across PC and MAC, access restrictions, etc., so maybe not easy for your level of skill.