Hooking up two Macs to a Thunder Bay drive

[Lawrenceblau]

i will try to explain my situation as best as I can. I currently have a MacBook Pro 2015 core i7 processor. When I am home I have it hooked up to a 2.5K external LG monitor and a Thunder Bay unit with four 6 tb drives. The Thunder Bay unit operates under thunderbolt two. I process my photos on this system. I am thinking of getting an IMAC Pro 10 core and would like both Macs to be able to access the Thunder Bay unit. I can get an adaptor for the iMAC from thunderbolt three to two. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Can I use the network system built into the MAC and have the iMAc hooked up to the Thunder Bay and then the MacBook Pro could access the IMAC through my wireless system? What is the best way to do this?

 

[giffut]

No, thunderbolt harddrive connections are single point ones, regarding the computer they attach to. You can daisy chain up to 6 thunderbolt devices to one computer. You can not attach several computers to one thunderbolt drive.
Only one active mac can be attached and access the content of this drive. You should not attach two running macs to the two thunderbolt connectors each on the thunderbay unit. Never! This can cause severe electrical problems for your macs and the raid and potential loss of all data. Don´t do it.

What you ask for is a NAS (network attached storage), where many computers can share a single drive/raid. What you have right now is a DAS (direct attached storage).

What you could do potentially - if one of the macs has two or more thunderbolt connectors like your macbook 2015 does - is to connect the two macs via thunderbolt cable to create a network connection between them and then share the drive which is connected to the second thunderbolt port from one of the macs to the other. You get network speed close to your maximal thunderbolt port speed.

 

[Lawrenceblau]

Thanks for the response. Would the connection be any faster using a wireless network connection?

 

[giffut]

Try it with the workflow you intend to use. It might be fine.

A dedicated cabled network is faster, but it always depends on the usage.

Using Thunderbolt 1/2/3 for networking gives you at least 10x the performance compared to 1Gbit ethernet.