How do you connect a HDD to two devices at once?

Forums › Laptops and mobile computers › How do you connect a HDD to two devices at once?

solaybro

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#143038 1-Apr-2014 19:24

I want to connect my external HDD to my laptop and my raspberry pi at the same time but have no clue on how to do this. How do I do this?

nathan

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#1016759 1-Apr-2014 19:33

you don't, you'll have to share it out over a LAN etc

solaybro

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#1016768 1-Apr-2014 20:05

nathan: you don't, you'll have to share it out over a LAN etc

Well that sucks. I'll look into LAN and see if I can do it.

freitasm

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#1016793 1-Apr-2014 20:25

If you already have an external USB HDD then you might be able to find a router with USB sharing capabilities. If you don't have an external HDD then you could get something such as the Kingston Wi-Drive. There's also a Kingston MobileLite that allows sharing over USB devices over WiFi.

Note that the MobileLite might not have enough power to spin up a HDD...

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DorianGray

2 posts

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#1028283 20-Apr-2014 18:09

Hi,
with the rasp the best way is to connect via LAN as of you can connect as much clients to the drive as you want and
the rasp has only 2 usb/1lan connection. i use a usb/lan bridge and it works not that bad. (2macs, 1rasp)
usb cant share connections so you really have only the way over a bridge (usb/lan or firewire/lan ...).

EDIT: if you do it over WIFI it will be pretty slow!

cheers
DC

solaybro

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#1028287 20-Apr-2014 18:17

DorianGray: Hi,
with the rasp the best way is to connect via LAN as of you can connect as much clients to the drive as you want and
the rasp has only 2 usb/1lan connection. i use a usb/lan bridge and it works not that bad. (2macs, 1rasp)
usb cant share connections so you really have only the way over a bridge (usb/lan or firewire/lan ...).

EDIT: if you do it over WIFI it will be pretty slow!

cheers
DC

I'm looking into using miniDLNA which would turn my raspberry pi into a nas server. Then I will just use my xbox to watch videos.

nzlegs

52 posts

Master Geek
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#1028318 20-Apr-2014 19:55

Connect upto 5 computers at a time using WiFi. You can purchase such devices as the Seagate Satellite 1GB hard drive which do this out of the box, the Kingston Wi-drive, or you can go to the tv shopping site http://yesshop.co.nz and purchase a wireless adaptor which you plug your USB drive into.

oops - it is 1TB Seagate drive and the Kingston Wi-drives are flash drives, not hard drives of upto 64 GB

you may purchase the Seagate from such famous places as Dick Smith or Noel Leeming, I got my 32 GB Wi-drives from Amazon, they have internal batteries which it is claimed will last at least 5 hours.

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DorianGray

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Wannabe Geek

#1028323 20-Apr-2014 20:25

hi,
I got my usb/lan bridge from www.compudoc.co.nz and i tried before via wifi and it was to
slow for my needs. i think miniDLNA would be a nice solution.

cheers