Networked Drive With 4 Partitions

[tpavur]

question is simple, what happens when 3 people try to access different partitions at the same time on my 2 TB drive that is connected to the Airport Extreme? I'm assuming with only 1 arm something would get messed up.

example:

watching Iron Man 2 from the hard drive with apple TV and then my wife starts going through photos on her MBP... then my iMac starts doing its time machine business.

Please help I'm kinda worried about this.

 

[sammich]

The thing that requires reliable bandwidth is a movie, because if it can't get the data in time for the next bit to play then it will stutter. The other cases will just take longer.

And I haven't heard good things about the speed of hard drive access from drives connected to the Airport Extreme, so I'd run some tests.

In short: things will take longer.

If you're worried about the hard drive working itself to death, don't worry, it won't happen.

 

[tpavur]

The thing that requires reliable bandwidth is a movie, because if it can't get the data in time for the next bit to play then it will stutter. The other cases will just take longer.

And I haven't heard good things about the speed of hard drive access from drives connected to the Airport Extreme, so I'd run some tests.

In short: things will take longer.

If you're worried about the hard drive working itself to death, don't worry, it won't happen.

So you don't think a HD version of Iron Man 2 would work with the HDD connected to the Airport Extreme? what if that is the only thing accessing the drive at the time? I guess a test that would work is just try to play the movie with my iMac off my networked drive and that would give me the same results right? I can't test it on Mac TV yet cause I am waiting for the new one to come out.

I'm not worried about it working itself to death I'm just worried it will freak out when two parts of the drive are trying to be accessed at the same time.

 

[sammich]

Yes, you will have to test it to find out if it still continues to play smoothly under heavy load.

And yes, if there are constant accesses to a hard drive from multiple applications, it can cause throttling of performance for everyone, but you won't know unless you test it. You can see this effect for yourself (this is very extreme) by copying two separate files from a CD/DVD at the same time).