External Drive/NAS question

gurusan

gurusan

gurusan

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Joined
2 Sep 2006
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Forest Grove, OR, 'Merica
Is it possible to make it so that a Hard drive can be connected externally to a desktop PC via USB 2.0 or Firewire, AND be a standalone drive that can share files across the network and function as a torrentbox, regardless if the PC is on or not?

Basically, I want a NAS that can be directly connected directly (not through my router) to a PC for fast transfer rates, but is also self-functioning so that I can shut down my main pc but still be torrenting and stuff.

Like so :p

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Your best bet is probably to get a gigabit NAS, switch and NIC. Connect your PC, router and NAS to the gigabit switch. Just make sure you read some reviews of actual throughput, just because things are gigabit class devices doesnt mean they can actually achieve it (I learnt this the hard way with my netgear GA311 NICs... 160mbits :mad:)

edit: If you've got an onboard NIC check your motherboard specs, a lot of newer boards have gigabit as standard
 
I dont think there's any device that lets you use USB/firewire and NAS functions at the same time tbh... wouldnt the OS expect to have exclusive access to the drive over USB/FW, ending up with filesystem corruption if the drive contents were changed without the OS knowing about it?
 
Or just have a Dual Nic NAS and dual NIC PC, then connect PC & NAS to router via Cat5 and connect NAS directly to PC using Cat6 (using a crossover cable to make it a direct PC<->NAS connection).

Provided the NAS is basically just another computer/server (or in your case a laptop in a custom case) this should be pretty easy to do.

I've done similar setups using Linux/FreeBSD for MySQL / backup servers which are directly locally connected (as opposed to going via a switch) and have had no problems provided you sort out routing issues. I've never done it using Windows though.
 
argh I think I'm just going to leave my main PC on and get a bigger drive. lol.

Pretty sure my pc doesn't use too much at idle anyway, I always leave speedstep on and with powerplay everythign should be pretty efficient.
 
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