External storage drives,

[Souranil21 chakraborty]

So i have a linux desktop and a windows laptop that i bought just. So is it possible to use a single external hard drive to use with both the machine?

[Fred Castellum]

Do you mean letting both devices access it at the same time? The external hard drive should work fine with either of the operating systems assuming it's using a compatible filesystem

[FloRolf]

13 minutes ago, MyInnerFred said:

Do you mean letting both devices access it at the same time? The external hard drive should work fine with either of the operating systems assuming it's using a compatible filesystem

Yeah i think he wants to access at the same time. That will not be possible. You'd need some kind of NAS, maybe just something basic like a WD Cloud or a Single Bay Synology. 

[Gum Joe]

If you want something janky/temporary, surely it's possible to plug the drive into one PC, setup a networking share on that PC pointing to the external drive then mount the share on the other? Broadly the way I'd apporach it at a high-level (no experience on settting up shares on Linux, and even then I've only ever tried something like this once):

• Plug drive into Windows
• Make sure SMB is on
• Use Windows' share menu on the external drive to create a SMB share
• Mount said share on the Linux machine
• Now both can access the drive!

You can porbably do this the other way round (and probably get more options to do it), but I've never done that before and don't want to provide bad advice.

 

(though, a NAS as @FloRolfsaid would be the much better long-term solution but you can do this if it's temporary)