Best way to share a drive on a network?

So here is my situation, I wanted to share an SSD in my desktop on my network so that I can copy media files/projects from my laptop to the desktop so the desktop can execute the video encoding/exporting once I finish editing the video on my laptop. How can I do this so that my SSD shows up as a network I can map on my laptop, but require a user/PW for other network users? Also, will this effectively give me gigabit speeds of 110-125MB/s? Or is there going to be some bottleneck by doing this?

mnewxcv said:

So here is my situation, I wanted to share an SSD in my desktop on my network so that I can copy media files/projects from my laptop to the desktop so the desktop can execute the video encoding/exporting once I finish editing the video on my laptop. How can I do this so that my SSD shows up as a network I can map on my laptop, but require a user/PW for other network users? Also, will this effectively give me gigabit speeds of 110-125MB/s? Or is there going to be some bottleneck by doing this?

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Let's clarify the speed/bottleneck first:

• If all clients are wired on a gigabit switch then your limitations for moving data across will be determined by the max read speed of the remote SSD, and the maximum WRITE speed of the local disk. People often forget the latter - reads are almost always higher, but if you're writing to a slower local disk, then that will be your bottleneck. The same will be true on the inverse - if your laptop is a spinning disk, you may not get the maximum read speed necessary for 125MB/s, but you'll be close to 80-100 if it's a 7200 RPM drive.

If the system you are hosting the files from are on a Windows machine, then all you need to do is share the folder from which the files are hosted. Then from a remote computer, you can access it very simply by navigating to your network from your Network and Sharing section in Control Panel. If the network you are connected to is setup as a "Private Network" then the sharing configurations you need are already setup by default. The other setting you are looking for is "Password Protected Sharing" which will challenge prompt any users connecting to this remote share which do not have local account on that computer. If you are accessing from a remote PC that has the same username/password you will be permitted, if not, you will get a challenge prompt to enter credentials.


More in-depth explanations: http://www.dummies.com/computers/op...-and-configure-sharing-options-in-windows-10/

If you want specific information on the "best" way to do this, we will need more specific information from you. What OS is your computer running? Is the SSD connected by SATA or is it NVMe? What is the speed of your network? Are you expecting to connect by Ethernet, or Wi-Fi?

All PC's are windows 10. The network is connected with a gigabit switch. I understand wifi will be slower, but I will use that occasionally. The drive I want to share will be nvme SSD which reads at something like 3GB/s, and writes about half that. The laptop I will access it from will have a sata ssd, but also nvme (which stores the media files I will be transferring). So basically, I am going from nvme to nvme over gigabit wired lan.

Unless I'm reading this wrong, you're talking about basic sharing here. I would recommend doing a search on Windows network sharing and mapping a network drive.

Ok, so the network connection will be your bottleneck for performance, nothing to worry about there. For Windows, I just create user accounts on the host PC, then go into advanced sharing to specify the users and permissions. As long as your login on your laptop matches the login on the host computer, you won't need any additional credentials. Plenty of walk-throughs on how to do this.

thanks a lot guys. I was worried I wouldn't be able to saturate my connection for some reason (like my NAS doesn't). Good to know it will work seamlessly. Now I wish I had a faster network. Oh well!

2.5/5g products are out that can increase your bandwidth between two points, but you're going to need NICs too and those aren't cheap yet.

Of course, you can go the secondhand 10gb route, but I think the dealbreaker there would be finding a 10gb adapter for the laptop.