Network Drive with USB 3

lostsoul62

Member
I'm looking for a Network Drive with USB 3 where I can import and export on the USB 3 to and from my computer and on the ethernet to other computers. Is there such a drive?
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Do you have a router that has a usb port for network drives? That would be the easiest way. If not, you'll have to create a network drive and map it on the other pc's.
 

lostsoul62

Member
My router looks like it's a USB 2. mapping a drive isn't the problem, re-read my post otherwise I'm missing something.
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
Well, the usb port on the router is for network attached storage. It would be easier to attach a usb external drive there and then all machines would be able to access it without having to map a network drive. It should just appear in explorer when connected. What router do you have?
 

lostsoul62

Member
I have a network drive that all my computers can share but I'm trying to exchange data between my computer and the Network drive at 5gbs instead of 1gbs. Also a USB 2 will only give you half the speed of the network.
 

beers

Moderator
Staff member
The drive isn't fast enough to saturate both interfaces, I think trying to throw USB in there will just make it more convoluted.
 

JaredDM

Active Member
I think you're misunderstanding what the USB ports on a NAS do. Those are to connect an external HDD to the NAS for backing up files from the NAS onto the external drive. You generally can't connect a computer to the USB ports of a NAS at all. To do so would be like plugging two computers into each other's USB ports. It'll probably cause a short in most cases since both are supplying voltage.

The only exception to this I know of is Drobo (which I really wouldn't recommend to anyone). Drobo does allow direct USB connection as well as a sort of NAS type iSCSI functionality. But, it's not going to have all the other nice features a good NAS like a Synology or Qnap would have.

Perhaps a better option than trying to use something as DAS and NAS is to just add DAS to the computer where you need the high speed, then synchronize between the NAS and DAS on the fly. That way it'll seem fast on the machine where you need the speed, but everything will still be getting synced back over time.

We deal in several Tb of data that we move around daily as we're a data recovery company dealing in full disk images. I've got a massive amount of DAS storage in my workstation (two RAID 6 arrays actually), but the critical data which needs to be backed up and shared interoffice gets two-way synced to a Synology NAS via their Synology Drive software. This way I never see any bottleneck due to network speed limitations but the backups and sync are still getting done.
 
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Cromewell

Administrator
Staff member
I think you're misunderstanding what the USB ports on a NAS do. Those are to connect an external HDD to the NAS for backing up files from the NAS onto the external drive. You generally can't connect a computer to the USB ports of a NAS at all.
I mean technically you could share the usb drive over the network, but agreed, probably not in the way the OP is thinking. And it's likely not a good idea.

You can get routers that have USB ports on them to connect drives to, it's functional but not generally the fastest.
 
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