Sharing External Hard Drive

Question

Hey   I have a Western Digital external hard drive that I used to have shared with a USB switch between 2 computers.  I have now moved my office into another room of the house and setup everything wireless.  I dont want the USB wireless running all over the place.  I setup to share the external harddrive on the other computer but it seems to work SLOW and every time I shut down that computer, it removes the sharing.  Does anyone have any other thoughts?  I see routers that have USB connectors on them so you can just connect it to the router.  Is this the way to go?  I currently have a Linksys WRT54G router.  Any help I would appreciate   Thanks

TadN · Answer

1. It will be slower since the router you mentioned is only 100TX speed (usb 2.0 is 400) wired. So 4x slower. Wireless is even worse...

If wired:

Upgrade to a 1000T wired network - bottleneck will then be the drive.
You may need a new router and network cards for this. I've got a netgear 5 port switch that cost ~$30 that I then plug into my router. Newer dells cone with a 1000T card built in.
If you're using wireless through the house then your network speed will be even slower (54T).
You can upgrade to Draft-N network devices and get close to usb 2.0 speed.

2. Yes the drive will dissappear off the network as soon as you turn off the pc it is attached to.

Linksys makes a network attached device that can share usb drives but it will not help your speed issue (you will be able to turn off either pc though)...
For the price of most of these network storage items, you can buy a cheap dell pc and just hook that up to the network and leave it on...(This is what I do btw.)

More details are available on Dell's network site:

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/product_support/en/wireless_solutions

Link off that page talks about sharing a drive or printer depending on your OS.

Message Edited by TadN on 01-24-200702:54 PM

Networking, Internet, & Bluetooth

Was this post helpful?