Problem with wanting to hook up new hard drive.

irishluck

irishluck

Member
I work here at a motorcycle shop and we use a decent amount of storage on the network.

We have an external hard drive that uses an Ethernet port into the router so we can access the drive from roughly 7 different computers.

Our external drive has run out of room and are expanding to a 1tb drive.

This being said, most all external drives use a USB port. The only Ethernet drives there are now are the NAS. They run from 300 and up and im really wanting to spend 150 and under for a external drive which i have found.

Well here's my problem, my routers don't have any usb ports on them so how do i use an external hard drive to use on the network?
 
I use the Seagate GoFlex 2TB drive attached to my home network.

I don't use their backup software, so I can't vouch for its utility, but it works for me to hold all the family music and photos as well as private storage for backups of our laptops.

Looks like it's on sale right now, as well.
 
Well Ive already found a hard drive. My question is how do i hook it up to be able to use it across my work network if the routers we use don't have any USB ports and since i also have an external hard drive with out an Ethernet port?

So how do i hook it up?
 
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You can attach it to one of the computers on the network then share it so that all the other computers have access to it. The drawback is that the computer you attach the external drive to must be powered up for the other computers to access the drive where with a drive attached to the router the other computers can access the external as long as the router is up and running.
 
strollin said:
You can attach it to one of the computers on the network then share it so that all the other computers have access to it. The drawback is that the computer you attach the external drive to must be powered up for the other computers to access the drive where with a drive attached to the router the other computers can access the external as long as the router is up and running.
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do you know of any actual external hard drives that have an Ethernet port in the back of it? instead of a NAS?
 
The very definition of NAS is a hard drive with an ethernet port attached.

If you wish, you could always build your own NAS using an old computer and free NAS software such as FreeNAS, OpenFiler, or ClearOS (though the latter is a lot more than NAS software).

Of course, you are not limited to an old computer; I've built an NAS using a nATX board and a spare SATA drive I had lying around.
 
To be honest, building a NAS machine is probably the best bet here. If you don't have a spare computer lying around, you can make one for about 300 bucks. However, unlike the ones you buy online, you can expand it later really quickly by just adding a hard drive. Also, you have a better opportunity to set it up the way you want it and not settle for what few features the retail counterparts offer.
 
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