Is there such a thing as a hard drive with two interfaces where you can use both at once?

Question

Is there any hard drive which can be controlled by two different interfaces at the same time? E.g. two USB ports, or one USB and one SATA, or one USB and one LAN/NAS?

What's your use case? Usually a HDD can only be mounted by 1 device. — spikey_richie, Oct 31 '17 at 16:03

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 20 '19 at 21:58

Actually, contrary to common sense expectations there is such a thing: Multipath I/O - devices with several connection routes to the system (which communicates with such a device). Such redundancy is typically a requirement of a carrier-grade systems. Often the device is within a SAN with iSCSI or FC being used as interconnect.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 01 '17 at 10:56

No common OS expects data on a disk to change by itself. Such a device wouldn't be considered a disk and couldn't be used just as one. It'd have horrible performance, wouldn't be safe (OS access controls can't be enforced) and wouldn't be cheap.

Try defining your use case and asking what hardware/software could do it. You may get better possibilities this way.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 04 '17 at 18:03

You could connect the drive to something like a raspberry pi zero and set it up as a media server. The RPi controls the drive and runs a media server allowing other devices to access it remotely even, for example, being able to use the drive as a remote drive on the other devices.

Is there such a thing as a hard drive with two interfaces where you can use both at once?

3 Answers3