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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

> A PC isn't a flash drive

That could be a kind of cool app that would allow you to present a folder on your PC as a media device. However that would then require a dreaded USB-A to USB-A type of cable <shudder>

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You can do this (in Linux, at least. Mobile devices like Android as well.) if the USB port of the peripheral side is a USB OTG port. I've only seen USB OTG ports as USB-B (standard and micro) or USB-C.

Edit: I didn't notice before, but USB OTG is on the front page right now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42585167

I think there was a RPi Zero project doing the round some years back that made use of this.

Target disk mode on a lot of older Mac machines did that over Firewire. You could boot the machine into target disk mode and it would present its mass storage over Firewire. It was pretty cool.

But you couldn't use the machine at the same time. This would be like a SAMBA share, but over USB

You can connect two computers with usb and setup network between them, so you can just use smb/cifs. Microsoft has even handy tutorial for that: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/co...

again this is not the same thing has allowing a USB cable to connect from a PC to another device that is expecting a device that would present itself as a mass storage device

I loved that feature- I could take my shitty old laptop into a university computer lab and boot a powerful brand new mac with fast internet from my hard drive- and use all of my software as if it was my own computer.

It could be done with USB-C. The computers would need to figure out which is the computer and the USB host, and which is the drive and act like USB device.

This is called gadget mode. I don't know what PCs can do it, but Raspberry Pi can do it.

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