Adding USB Drives to a Wireless Network?

So here's the situation, we have in our house 2 laptops, 2 USB external drives and an ethernet capable printer. At the moment we just have an Apple Airport Express for a wireless router, but I want to network both the drives and the printer. The printer is easy, but the hard drives present a problem, since they're just USB/Firewire. Is there an easy way to get them on the network without being connected to one of the laptops? I'd like to just get a cheap router (like a Linksys WRT54GL) if possible. Will a USB hub with an ethernet connection be enough (like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812425001)?

 

I think that hub provides network connectivity to a notebook via the notebook's USB port and won't do what you want.

One option is to buy one of the Asus routers which include USB ports. You can definitely connect one HDD. I'm not sure about 2 - I connected a printer to the other port. However, you need to format the HDDs with a Linux filing system because the router runs Linux.

The alternative is to get external HDD enclosures which include a network port. These exist for 3.5" HDDs but I haven't seen them for 2.5" HDDs.

John

 

search google for NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE

many NAS devices can plug into the ROUTER and have USB ports to plug extra USB DRIVES into.. some of these NAS devices are just the NAS CONTROLLER with no HDD (thus costing much less than a NAS w/ it's own HDD)

i own the Maxtor Shared Storage II,, which is hooked into my router and accessable via WIFI.... and w/ 2 USB PORTS i can hook extra HDDs or PRINTERS up to be shared across the network as well

bigO

 

An NAS enclosure for my good ol' fashion IDE drive sounds appealing, but they seem to be quite pricey, on top of purchasing a router. If I were to buy a router with a USB port, could I get a splitter to run 2 USB drives through the single port? Would it just act like a multi-partitioned single drive?

 

Belkin makes a USB network hub, the F5L009 for precisely this sort of situation. To set the Belkin hub up, you connect the hub to one of the four ethernet sockets on the back of your wireless router, and then plug a USB device, such as a USB drive into one of the five USB 2.0 sockets on the network hub.

I will give one caveat about the hub, although this may have been fixed in a later revision to the firmware/software that came out after I stopped using the hub: If you permit the hub client software on your computer to startup and try to find the hub when the hub itself has been powered off, the client application, at least when i was using it, seemed to suffer from a memory leak or some other bug that caused it to eventually eat up all of the available CPU time as it continually tried to poll for the powered-off hub.

 

I had considered purchasing the Belkin network hub, but read a review on Newegg that complained that only one computer could have access to the attached drives at a time and you had to manually disengage that computer after each use before another computer on the network could access it. This would be unacceptable on my network (ie. gf would not know how to work it).

 

Plus considering the bad quality of their routers, I would stay away from Belkin.

 

Check out NBR's review of this very hub. It is not very good, IMHO, for data intensive apps.

The one PC per device thing is a feature of USB that no one can get around.