One Firewire and One networking question

[slughead]

1. Is there any way to make a computer boot automatically into Firewire Target Disk mode? By that I mean: without holding "T" down?

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2. I saw steve jobs Edit a movie via 1000BaseT.. is this really feasible? I'd like to basically use an old G4 as a network drive with my gigabit network, I'm wondering if I should.


Thanks all!

 

[stoid]

You could glue the T key down or something. But there is no way to make it always boot into Target Disk Mode. If you'd like, you can get an enclosure, pull out the internal drive, and build it into an external drive. Of course, that only works if it's a tower.

Standard FireWire is 400 Mbps (about 50MB/s theoretical peak), whereas Gigabit ethernet is 1000 Mbps (about 125MB/s theoretical peak), so the bandwidth should not be a problem. In fact, I'm sure that professional houses use some form of networked drives, since the HD video they use must require many terabytes of storage. I don't know if they use ethernet based solutions though. It's possible that the ethernet set-up will introduce some latency that will make it impossible.

If the main problem is that you've got an old tower that you don't need for anything except the HD, I would buy an external enclosure and pull the drive from the tower.