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PC EXPERIMENTS

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by astral_traveller

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Got 2 spare PCs, Going to connect the 2 Primary IDE channels together across the 2 separate machines,(PC1 PRI IDE to PC2 PRI IDE), HDD placed in between the 2 PCs. Might even make up some new cables for more HDDs. I don't expect it to blow up, but you never know with stuff like this. I expect to mess with some boot configs to get it to work.
Anyone done anything like this? I would like to hear what you all think will happen before I go ahead and switch "this" experiment on. Lets hear from you and I'll let you all know what did happen !!!

5 replies

by bfilmfan

This is not going to work. You cannot create a parallel array by hooking up IDE controllers from multiple systems to IDE drives.

If it were this easy to create a storage array, EMC would not billions each year selling fiber solutions featuring terabytes of storage.

Save yourself soem trouble and go play in the lab with the nice recombinant DNA.

by jck

I think you'd have to re-write the controllers on both machines so that they'd talk back and forth.

I'm pretty sure that neither motherboard has the required communications schema to talk to the other, i.e.- they can send commands to retrieve and store data, but probably don't know how to perform those tasks or give the proper response once completed like a hard disk drive does.

Re-write the software on the motherboards' IDE controllers to include both motherboard and disk controller logic and it may work....given the pinouts are compatible as well.

by mjd420nova

those two controllers are going to lock up and
neither machine will see controllers or hard drive

by sleepin'dawg

You are going to create a whole lot of conflicts in device addresses which will freeze one if not both boxes. Which box will host the primary controller and how do you plan to access the secondary controller??? What are you hoping to achieve by this??? Parallel processing capability of some sort??? It's fun to experiment but you should have a goal or purpose in mind.

Dawg ]:)

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