Re: [OT] Virtual USB or Sata drive over network possible?

["dermot_bradley" <bradley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, "John Risby" <john@...> wrote:
>
> I've got a technomate 6900 hd satellite receiver/pvr which can
> record onto usb memory sticks, usb drives or sata drives.

When you say SATA I guess you mean E-SATA?

> I was wondering if there was any usb or sata adapators that would
> convert to cat5 and allow the use of a server on the network to
> store the data? ie. run a service on a windows or linux server on
> the network with a "virtual drive" and then somehow connect
the
> technomate to it using the usb or sata port and then save directly
> to the server? the technomate would still think it was saving to a
> phyiscal usb or sata drive, but really it would be saving onto a
> connected network server. Possible?

There are various devices on the market to extend USB over CAT5 - the
problem is that they'll only do USB1.x speeds, not USB2.0 so any
transfer will be slow and therefore the Technomate might not handle
this due to the amounts of data it needs to write in real-time while
recording.

Assuming the Technomate could handle the slow speed of USB1.x then I
guess you could plug the other end of the USB-over-CAT5 boxes into a
Linux machine - Linux gained the USB Gadget support about 6 months ago
(from memory) so in theory I guess you could make a Linux box appear
to be just a USB mass storage device. I'm not sure if all the support
is currently in Linux for this to work yet or not...



------------------------------------

********************************************
Limited Time Offer - Free iPhone VAT Calculator
http://berble.com/index.php/component/content/article/109
********************************************