wifi network storage

[HamMan]

I have a main PC connect directly to a Netgear DG834GT router and two other laptops connected by WIFI to the router. The PC has a USB connected external hard drive.
It would be useful to be able use the hard drive so that it could be accessed by the PC and both laptops. I have heard of NAS devices but it seems expensive.
Is it possible to set up the external drive to the router so all connected machines will be able to use it? I have a spare Sky router, a SAGEM F@ST 2504 which I could use if the NETGEAR will not support what I need.

[dragon2611]

You can get devices that turn existing USB drives into NAS's but i have no idea if they're any good or not.

[Scubbie]

None of Sky's routers have an external USB port, so you won't be able to share the drive in this manner.

Another way would be to share the contents of the drive via the normal sharing process or install something like 'Serviio' if you would like a DLNA server.

As for costs of NAS drives, I saw the Netgear ReadyNAS DUO being advertised for just under £100 the other day. Add the cost of two hard drives (3TB are the largest it can take at around £120 each), this brings the total cost to around £340. This would provide you with a total capacity of around 5500GB.

ReadyNAS Duo - £100 - Netgear ReadyNAS Duo 2-Bay No Disk Desktop Network Storage System: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

WD30EZRX - £120 each - WD Caviar Green
WD20EZRX - £91 each - Eclipse Computers - Product Details
WD10EZRX - £65 each - Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EZRX 1 TB 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - SATA/600 - 64 MB Buffer - WAE+

Two smaller drives would obviously cost less but also provide less storage space. You could always purchase one drive now and add the 2nd later too with the ReadyNAS. Read the instructions first so that you choose the correct formatting process when setting it up to allow for this.

[dragon2611]

There was a zyxel single bay nas on offer at ebuyer the other week think it was £60 for the nas alone ore £120 with a 2TB drive in.

If your not to bothered about power consumption/noise the HP microservers often have £100 cash back offers on making them something stupid like £150

They hold 4 drives by default and it's possible to get a 5th in the optical bay

Mines currently running nexenta stor and gets 100MB/s writes to software raid1 with compression and dedupe off

Gets 20 - 30MB/s with them on since deduplication and/or compression are pretty CPU heavy (actually dedupe uses a lot of ram to)

Also being zfs based it supposedly can detect file corruption during read/write and attempt a repair if enough redundant data is available.

Personally if it's any data you care about then back it up! I don't even trust raid for my important data I keep an offsite copy as well.


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[HamMan]

Thankyou for the information. The amount of data that I want to share is very small, documents only, and not very often so spending 100's on nas seems excessive. Perhaps I will carry on transfering data between PC's using memory sticks when needed.

[Scubbie]

If you are only looking to share a small amount of data, then consider something like a single 1TB drive for now, with the idea that you will add a 2nd drive later.

A NAS can be quite versatile. I use mine to backup the documents, etc. on my Laptops, as well as for sharing music, video and pictures.

You can set up different User IDs so that everyone can store their own documents and only they can access them, or you can set up common areas so that everyone can access.

If you have a TV that can stream on-line content, then it is likely that it will also be able to play music & video off the NAS.

Sure a single drive isn't secure, but it would show you what can be accomplished with one.

As for sharing small data files between computers, why not consider installing something like Dropbox? The free account is limited to a few GBs but you can subscribe and gain access to more space. Dropbox is a simple way to painlessly share files and if you have the same account on your own computers, all files will be promptly available to all of them. Alternatively you could have one account for yourself, another for your partner and perhaps a third for your children.

Another option would be to purchase a 2nd hand PC. Just make sure that it has a few USB ports. Set it all up, then place it somewhere where access is restricted, but where it can connect to your LAN. You can then connect your USB drive to this computer and share it's contents over your network. Don't worry about the quality of the monitor. If you have one laying around, you could easily use that.

Install something such as "LogMeIn" and you should hardly ever need to actually touch the PC in the future. A suitable 2nd hand PC shouldn't cost much more than £100.

Going back to the sharing of music & video, Serviio is a nice package which can handle this.

[Isitme]

If you network your PCs/Laptops you will be able to share the HDD and anything else you want including a printer. The only disadvantage is the PC with the HDD/Printer would have to be turned on.