Using a PC as external HD for game storage for multiple console in different locations? Could be a good video idea - Just saying...

[bommerbob]

Basically I want to be able to plug my game consoles into a usb port (or usb over CAT6 since whole home is hardwired back to an electrical/IT closet) on my home media server but I want the PC to simulate an external hard drive so that for instance games and saves can be accessed on the console in the living room and the console in the bedroom. Also it would be nice to be able to have the data redundancy for saves that could be backed up to the cloud or via RAID. Does anyone know of a program that can do this? Or alternatively could I plug both consoles into the same USB external HD since it is just a data bus or would I presumably have issues with the consoles trying to talk to one another?  Anyone got any experience with this?

[PlayStation 2]

When it comes to that, you're at the mercy of a number of things, namely:

• Different formatting for drives on the consoles
• Different ways of accessing said drives on the consoles

[SupaKomputa]

Why not just buy a big HDD with SATA to USB enclosure, save a lot of hazzle.

[Archer42]

You cannot attach one storage device to multiple computers even if physically possible (which is not for usb, and if you try it you'll probably need one of this), like in case of iscsi. The reason being most filesystems are not designed to be accessed by multiple OS at once and will be destroyed if you try. There are filesystems which support this, but then you run into the issue that no console or any other device apart from PC with appropriate OS will support it.

The only plausible way to achieve what you want are just regular shares, but then i suspect consoles will not allow that either...

 

Or shorter version - what you want is basically impossible.

[Bombastinator]

I dunno if it would work or not (some here seem to say no) but it sounds like even if it could be gotten to work it would be a real horror much more annoying than merely schlepping a drive from location to location.

[Mling]

Sounds like you want a private cloud application for console, which there is none AFAIK. Can you plug a phone into your console and use that as storage? If yes then it might be doable.