One drive, three or four computers ???

[Ummon]

I don't really know the details of how those network stations work. There are multiple drives. Are each of these for a computer/terminal? If I ran one large internal drive with a few computers on the network and more than one accessing at the same time, would there be conflicts? Would it mess the drive up? How bout with a multiple port external usb drive?

[Ummon]

Bumping this with a modification up top.

[DaOld Man]

You can get a network drive, which connects right into your ethernet network.
You will need a router for each device (PC's and the network drive).
All PCs on the network will be able to access data on this network drive.
But I think it is rather expensive.
You will still need a hard drive on each PC.
Would it be conflicts? I dont know, if all are hammering on the drive at the same time, it may be some wait time (milliseconds, but this can mean a lot if you are playing a high end game.)
Would it mess up the drive? Nah

The multiple drives you speak of may be a raid setup.
Raid uses several hard drives for redundant data storage. If one drive fails, the other drives hold the data, so it is a lot more safer, as far as data goes. You can also set up a raid system to use all the drives as one storage, giving you a lot of storage space. Also raid drives can be pulled out of the system with power on and computer running (hot swappable).
Search the net for "networking hard drives".

[u_rebelscum]

Network drives can be slower then USB drives, to faster than a local internal drive.  It all depends on the network speed, network switch quality, how the network drive is setup (OS, disk(s) used, which RAID [if used], etc), network card quality, and all the other network stuff.  Most of the cheaper "network drives" you see in a box are linux/unix based, the expensive network "storage servers" are full computers with windows server OSs, and the ones in between could be anywhere in between.  With a good OS, gigabit network, decent switch, high speed drives, and RAID 5/6, it's possible to read from the network drive faster than from a local drive.  RAID 5/6 is better designed for multiple people to access "the drive" at the same time with less slow down, but in normal conditions, small workgroups (half a dozen computers) rarely will push even a network shared single drive to it's max.

There are ways to hook one external drive to two computers through USB, but I'd stick to network drives if you have four computers.

With network drivers, you should have zero problems with multiple people reading from the drive at the same time.  There are cases were the application isn't multiple user aware resulting in some problems.  One OTTOMH example is two computers running the same game in mame at the same time and sharing the same cfg folder; I believe mame reads the cfg file only at startup, but writes when you exit the remap UI and exit mame.  If both try to remap, the one to exit mame last wins and the other remap is lost.  Many apps are multiple access aware, and have ways of "fixing" the problem.  However, this isn't corrupting the drive nor just that file.  And to repeat, reading the same file at the same time will NOT cause issues.

However, there is a wide range of quality in the network drives out there.  I've read some bad user reviews of some of the lower end network drives.  I've just played with a couple full blown storage servers at work, so I can't help you on the cheaper end.  And at home, I just share a folder on my biggest harddrive on one computer regularly between two other computers.  The biggest problem is that computer has to be on all the time, and the fans have gotten a lot louder since I first got it, and it problably is using more electricity than a smaller stand alone drive.

Do you have any specific questions, or are you looking for basic info (wikipedia NAS, 3 year old review and basic how it works)?

[Ummon]

Thanks. That makes things much clearer. I just wanted some general information at first.