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I bought an external drive (WD "My Passport" 2Tb USB3.0) and am looking for the "right way" to share it between a PC and Mac. I am currently sharing a folder on the PC's HDD with my Mac over wifi (smb), and I could just hook the drive up to my PC and share it the same way I am sharing the C drive.

Is there a way to utilize USB3 to share the external drive with both machines?

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  • Please do not cross post. If you want a post moved please Flag it and describe why. Thank you!
    – Chris S
    Feb 25, 2013 at 18:20
  • I thought that if you had a USB enabled wifi router that it would allow the sharing of an external hard drive like that? Also they make wifi enabled external hard drives as well that could be a good solution to your problem.
    – user202204
    Feb 25, 2013 at 18:24
  • I didn't actually. Whew! Seems this question was already on SU and they've basically said the same thing as @mfinni before it was merged from ServeFault. I probably should have thought to look at SU, but it seemed to me like a networking question. Thank you for the advice about cross posting, I didn't understand these sites were connected like that.
    – Shanimal
    Feb 25, 2013 at 18:32
  • I'll check into that
    – Shanimal
    Feb 25, 2013 at 18:33
  • Some WiFi routers allow you to share USB storage over SMB or NFS. But it's essentially what he's doing now. It does NOT allow sharing as a USB device to multiple computers.
    – Chris S
    Feb 25, 2013 at 18:35

1 Answer 1

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You are using one of the proper ways to do this - a network file system. NFS or SMB/CIFS are examples of this. The server that it's directly attached to mediates access to the files by the clients.

You can't directly attach a disk to multiple hosts and allow them to use it, without using a cluster-aware filesystem that is correctly configured on all the hosts. Examples are NTFS with Windows Clustering, or VMFS for VMware ESX(i). If there isn't a way for the attached hosts to coordinate with each other that they're writing to the same disk, they will trash it badly.

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