Can i hook up 1 hard drive up to 2 pcs/xboxes

[TheGreatUnknown]

I want to know if i can link a large drive up to multiple devices as the primary or game drive.

 

Me and my wife play a lot of the sme games and the pcs are close together and it seems like a waste of space to have 2 copies of the same game.

 

That and the mad scientist in me is curious if frankencomputer will live?

[Pixel5]

unless you got a hard drive with two sata ports (which dont exist) this is not possible.

[TheGreatUnknown]

So no spliters or usb hubs?

[Windows7ge]

No. Only one system can have access to the drive at a time. The correct solution here would be to setup the drive on the network and have each system connect to it that way.

[Pixel5]

4 minutes ago, TheGreatUnknown said:

So no spliters or usb hubs?

if you are really lucky you may find a USH hub that supports two host at once but i doubt it and even if you do you dont really want to start any game off an USB hub due to transfer speed and latency limitations.

Same if you actually make it work and both PC access the drive at the same time its gonna be super slow.

[fordy_rounds]

4 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

if you are really lucky you may find a USH hub that supports two host at once but i doubt it and even if you do you dont really want to start any game off an USB hub due to transfer speed and latency limitations.

Same if you actually make it work and both PC access the drive at the same time its gonna be super slow.

Good luck with this. The USB standard only allows one device to be host at a time. A hub that supports two hosts would be out of standard, and could lead to all sorts of collisions and possibly data corruption. I don't recommend this.

The right solution here, as suggested by @Windows7ge, is to connect the HDD to just one computer, then share it over the network. It might run slower on the secondary PC, though, so be aware of that (especially if you are wirelessly networked). On the other hand, if it's spinning disk, it's likely to be slower than your LAN speeds anyway....

[LauRoman]

Connecting it to a router that has a usb port AND (this is important) supports using it for storage, then yes, it can work.

 

Advantages over connecting it to one machine is that a router is pretty much on 24/7, compared to a computer that can run out of battery or be asleep.

 

Not sure if xbox (never owned one) can map network drives.

 

To what end are you wanting to do this? Because there may be an easier option.

[TheGreatUnknown]

Thank you all for the info id like to try the network option it seems interesting