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I am looking at expanding my Mac Mini Server with a LaCie 10TB 5big Thunderbolt Series Hard Drive, I have received mixed messages about whether it is possible to use a Thunderbolt drive to setup network share points on the Mac Mini Server it is plugged in to.

Is it possible to have a Thunderbolt drive shared on the network as a Mac Sharepoint?

James
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2 Answers2

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This is a recommended solution by Apple, actually. It was one under consideration when I was looking for a way to implement company-wide Apple laptop backups.

Since thunderbolt is a high-bandwidth interconnect, there are some very interesting external hardware RAID enclosures available for it. You can run any of these behind a Mini (Ideally using OS X Server) and share the volume to clients.

Community
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ewwhite
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  • What format are thunderbolt drives in? – James Mar 23 '14 at 17:44
  • They're presented as block devices to your Mac... so you can format them the same way you would an internal drive. Use HFS+. – ewwhite Mar 23 '14 at 17:46
  • Thanks, I was concerned that spending so much on a device that I would not be able to use it for network share points, I have found reports online that some people found that users couldn't use the share. – James Mar 23 '14 at 17:58
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Yes, this is certainly possible. Any directly-connected block storage (USB, Thunderbolt, iSCSI, etc.) can be shared in OSX.

EEAA
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