We have a team of five people working on the same video editing project (using Lightworks). Our current setup technically works, but not well: the video jiggles up and down as it plays and sometimes blacks out completely. The good folks at the Lightworks forum suggested that a 10 Gigabit network was needed, but that would be quite expensive, especially since we are using laptops and don't really have a way to add a 10 Gb NIC. Are there any other high-bandwidth options that would allow these machines to share storage? These machines do have USB 3.0, is there some kind of external drive or NAS that can attach to 5 USB ports? Would a 10 Gb NIC to USB 3.0 adapter be any good? Does such a thing even exist? Any other options that wouldn't require us to purchase new computers with 10 Gb support? USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet are the fastest external connectors on these laptops.
1 Answers
I would still be curious to know if anyone has an answer to my question, i.e. are there other ways to share storage with multiple computers with access speeds over 1 Gb, besides setting up each computer with a 10 Gb NIC and connecting them to a 10 Gb switch.
For laptops: None. USB (2.0, 3.0, 3.1), eSATA and Thunderbolt used for direct attached storage can be fast, but these devices typically expect one host. Not three. And as shared media you end up with Ethernet or fibre.
You already considered 1Gbit Ethernet, and that is probably the best you can do atm on a laptop.
If you are will not make your laptop immobile (e.g. treat it as a desktop) then you could use the laptops PCI-e lanes (e.g. froman expresscard slot) and lead them outside the laptop. This is done mostly for external graphics card, but you could connect 10GbE Ethernet cards this way.
It would be fun to build, but using a desktop instead would be a much more practical solution. (optionally using your laptop as a thin client to RPD into the desktops).
Some links onto the hackish-solution:
Expresscard to external PCI-e (Unaffiliated with them, just one item I had bookmarked).
A post here on [su] about using 3 computers with 10Gbit speeds without a very expensive 10Gbit switch
