Looking For Storage Option

[minnieadkins 0]

I ran out of space, so I started looking into external hard drives. They seem to be pretty good, but there are sepecific reasons that I need the hard drive for. I have a 120 gb, and it's fine for my home use of gaming/media/apps. Everything's good. But after several games and several apps I have no room for media. So I thought about it, and my wife has a 60 gb hard drive, and also has a lot of the same media. I thought, why not get an external hard drive, about 200 gb or so, and store all the media on a single drive then share it between both computers. First off, she has usb 1.1 and I have 2.0. I think you can buy a card for USB 2.0, so if I needed I could probably upgrade her pc and havea couple of ports. What I need to know is: Is this possible?Can both computers access the hard drive at the same time, and play the media at the same time?Can it be done w/o networking, but by plugging 2 usb cords into the same external hard drive?I've never done anything like this before. I've always had internal hard drives, Should I just buy a 200 gb hard drive for myself and add the 120 gb to her pc and leave the media file seperate. Just wondering if anyones tried soemthing like this. Seems kinda redundant to have the same media files on multiple computers on the same network. Any other ways of solving this problem are greatly appreciated.

[organicbmx 0]

i have a external harddrive for backups and additional storage. mine has two firewire ports and one usb. so i guess it would be phisically possible to plug into two computers. but i am very sure that it would not work. it might if only one computer was on at a time. i think this is not possiblewhy don't you just buy a new 200gig and share it on the network [do you have one?], then you could both access the media and keep your individual drives for your own stuff.better still you could piece togeather a really cheep home server. the guys on here will help you with a linux server install. just find an ok old copmuter and a couple of drives and you have it for free. and non related to having the other computer turned on.

[wutske 0]

As far as I know there's no external usb driver that can do that. organicbmx, I think the other firewire connector could be for attaching other firewire devices (so it acts like a hub -tough I'm not shure firewire can have hubs- ?).Best solution would be a NAS (networked attached storage), but that's prolly too expensive and not what you want.Other thing would be share it through a network (via windows sharing), it's not that hard, so it's realy worth a try (tough I suggest using an internal drive if you' do that, because they work faster and they also use less cpu power (usb uses lots more cpu than internal/firewire)