Simplest thing is to share those drives. Right-mouse-button click on the drive icon in Windows Explorer or My Computer and select sharing.

As Rob points out, speed can be an issue. Depending on what you're doing USB2 might be sufficient, if not blindingly fast. It is 400Mbps, which is a substantial portion of gigabit speed.

I still prefer to have a computer with a lot of internal drives act as the file server. External drives are slow, clunky, and not the most reliable.

If you have hard drives that are 7200rpm sata II or sata III connectivity and of good quality - you can house them in inexpensive USB3 enclosures and achieve a very high transfer rate providing the PC you connect to has native USB3 connectivity.

Short of that ideal, your transfer rate and utility to make use of it drops down in the following scenario of order.
1) next best is network shared drives over 1 gig network
2) and finally USB 2.0 connectivity with needed enclosure and PC - gets the job done, although tedious.

I have a drive hooked up USB to one computer and then I map it as a network drive to the other. That way both computers have access.

Permanent is a key word here. I assume you want concurrent access?

Gigabit ethernet would be a good start, and you might actually want to have a third system serving files to the other workstations. Perhaps FreeNas can do that. You *might* want some sort of file locking so that two users aren't competing to write to the same file or same volume.

If you want more throughput I think your options are link aggregation (two or more gigabit paths combined) or fiberchannel. Fiberchannel = $$$.

We use an Xsan setup here. two Mac mini servers attached to storage arrays over thunderbolt and then somehow attached to fiber. They're set up to fail over to each other. I've lost track of how we accomplish all of this but it seems like overkill for our current number of workstations. The problem is that other setups are underkill.

The problem with using Mavericks as a server to Windows is that Apple's SMB server in Mavericks is FUBARed. It's okay to apple clients but has a bad habit of only showing *some* files to windows clients.

Rob

If you're not hung up on speed, I suggest the Cirago NUS2000 NAS. You can plug in up to four USB3 drives and any PC on your local net can use it. Mine's been running for months.

Thanks guys for the direction much appreciated.

One PC is win 7 64 bit the other xp pro 32 bit as I still use some aps running 32bit with graphics card for those aps therefore I can’t upgrade yet so direct networking is an issue.

From the replies I see that getting a small HD server as a third system = not expensive or complicated to put into action.

The Cirago NUS2000 NAS looks perfect for my immediate requirements..
Steve can you work from data on a hard drive at the same time from both PC’S?

"Steve can you work from data on a hard drive at the same time from both PC’S?"

I have two drives on the Cirago and haven't noticed any problems when all of the PCs in the home are connected to one or both of the drives. I even mounted one on my Raspberry Pi running Linux.

The only drawback is my 100Mbps LAN. One of these days I'll buy a gigabit switch and then the USB will be the choke point.

OK thanks. Raspberry Pi amazing little thing. I am working on a project to get a RPi and a brushless to track from a mini jib, unfortunately can’t write code.

I can write the code, but I can't figure out the hardware.

Get yourself a NAS. I use a Buffalo Linkstation and have been very happy with it. Anything I need to share across my Mac's and PC's goes on the NAS. It's on 24/7, attaches directly to my router. Some models allow you to plug-in an additional drive via USB so it would even work with portable drives.

~jr

Steve can you work from data on a hard drive at the same time from both PC’S?

I know you didn't address this to me, but... I imagine the issue would be two or three users trying to write to the same file. We run into this a little because we have three edit stations running FCP and all of the project data and files are on the SAN. So it would be possible for all three people to open the same project file and edit it if there weren't some form of file locking.

There are probably ways around this for the average Vegas user in that you could at least keep your veg files locally. However, SFK files would still be written into the same folders as the media and I don't really know what would happen if multiple Vegas instances on multiple computers were all trying to create the same sfk files. Maybe nothing.

It'd be nice for Vegas to offer a little more control over where sfk files go. When I use Vegas at work I usually pull all the media over locally because I don't want to irritate the FCP users by dumping several hundred SFK files into their media folders. If I could keep those files local while using remote media I'd be happier.

Steve's option is quite inexpensive if you already have USB 3.0 drives. You wouldn't be out much money to go that route, and then if you find yourself running into problems you can move on from there.

Regarding Link aggregation, here's an article that gives you a sense of it. I'm not endorsing this product.
http://www.synology.com/en-global/support/tutorials/525

Rob