External Hard Drive Question

[Number1SuperGuy]

I've got an external hard drive with both an eSATA and USB attachment. The eSATA is hooked up to my PC and my girlfriend is bringing over her laptop tonight. I was just curious if I could leave the eSATA hooked up to my PC while simultaneously hooking up the USB to her laptop? It isn't something that's necessary, it would just make it easier to not have to unhook the eSATA, plus it would be kind of neat to be able to share the external at the same time.

 

[bretthexum]

Interesting, I've always wondered about this. You wouldn't think it would work with both OS's trying to mount the drive. Maybe they could both read but writing might be an issue. I'd try with a drive that didn't have any data you didnt care about losing!

 

[fmw]

The problem is that the O/S maintains a drive map so that it knows where to write things on the drive. Two different O/S's with two different maps would cause one O/S to overwrite things the other O/S had written. The correct way to do it would be to network the two computers and share the drive with the network. That will keep things straight.