Tom's Hardware > Forum > General Networking > Network General Discussions > connecting to external hard drive to my home network
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bluejackal06   04-01-2007 at 02:00:45 AM

Hi,
I recently bought a WD external hard drive and i want to connect it to my home network. I want it to be accessible to all the computers through the network. i dont want to connect it to one computer and expose it as a shared folder. This would be make the drive inaccessible if the connected computer is switched off.

I have a Linksys Wireless router which doesnt have any USB interface. What would be the best way to achieve this? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Blue

P.S. I cannot afford a network hard drive.

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Iceblue   04-01-2007 at 02:46:22 AM
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You say you can't affored a network drive, but you want to connect your drive to the network... hmmm....

Seriously, I don't know what your budget is, but maybe one of these is what you are looking for.

Caveat: the above is not a recommendation (except for Newegg - I do recommend them). Also, I noticed the cheapest device in that list is only a USB external box - to pay attention to the specs.

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Anonymous   01-08-2009 at 11:47:49 PM
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Hmmm... He didn't say he could not afford a network drive and he also said he has an external drive, which means you would not need hard drive enclosures such as the page you referred to. Want to try again? ;)

I'm also researching the best option for making an external drive networked and available to any device on the network such as my xbox 360 or MAC notebook or Windows laptop.

Western Digital makes a 2TB mirrored drive and plays well with the Airport Extreme, but I'm looking for a less expensive solution since that is all I want to do, attach external drives.

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montyuk   01-09-2009 at 12:12:51 PM
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well ive also been looking into this recently, ive settled on the belkin f5d8235 which has a usb port on the back for connecting usb devices.

you could also go with the belkin usb network hub which looks like it has half decent management software

another company to look at is Edimax who do a router with 2 usb ports on the back.

you could look on ebay for a used buffalo linkstation pro / live / 2share but avoid the 'lite' versions.

a lot of these types of connectors suffer from really quite pathetic transfer rates (around 5-15mbps) so please look into the different solutions and read some reviews, i have yet to find one that has fast transfers so as long as your happy with a reduction in performance in return for network access you'll be fine.

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