Two Computers, One Hard Drive

[Confusion88]

As stupid as the subject of this may sound, I guess I'll be better off explaining.

So, after they made the "Cleanest Setup" video, it got me thinking more about other ways of possibly doing this, but in a different way.

Basically, what I am wondering is: would it ever be possible to have a kind of "shell" desktop, with all the components except for a hard drive, and then to have a laptop that you just plug in and the hard drive and other components become shared among the computers?

Thinking about it, this seems impossible, as you would essentially have double of everything and it seems you might need a hub that acts like the motherboard.

You could, of course, link it through a network, or have an external hard drive, but both those options seem somewhat impractical.

Would this ever be possible? Sorry if this is a stupid question....

[boltoflightning]

I don't believe it is. Two computers cannot read and write simultaneously on one consumer hard drive, but I think they do on servers, though that's far more complex and they're dedicated to that purpose. With all due respect, as I kinda like the idea, your concept would not work.

[Pixel5]

stuff like this technically is possible, but not done to this extend.

you can see implementations like this in the surface book with performance base where the base has an extra GPU.

 

doing this whole thing just to share a hard drive would be very silly as now the one connection you use needs to carry all signals as well as do the data transfers of the hard drive for zero benefit.

[mariushm]

There are thin client computers which can boot and load everything from a server.

Some may have a core/minimal operating system on an SD card (plugged in a slot on the motherboard) or from an internal usb stick, and then download the rest through the network (user profile, login info etc) and save everything on the server.

 

 

[SupaKomputa]

Unraid can do this.

[Windows7ge]

Not as simply as plugging a laptop into the tower but with a virtualization server running an OS such as PROXMOX, unRAID, or ESXi it is possible to allocate multiple devices like GPU/Ethernet/USB/etc into groups and make it so you can plug multiple monitors, keyboards, mice, Ethernet cables, etc directly into the machine all behaving as independently controlled computers off one box.

 

Not exactly the same as what you're asking but similar.