How to set up wireless external hard drive at home?

07
2014-07

lawphotog

I am looking for a wireless external hard drive at home and needing some advice.

I started googling yesterday and thought WD My Cloud seems pretty good. Before I make an impulse purchase, i read around more about the product and I found out it needs to connect to wireless router. That is a deal breaker for me. I live in a shared house and I simply don't have access to my wireless router. THE END. (even smart phones now-a-days can create wireless hotspot and i expected a product like this will have built in wireless router).

The problem I am trying to solve here is I want to have access to all my files in my external hard drive (i have a USB external hard drive 4TB) from all my devices while I am at home. I have a desktop, a laptop, a tablet and a phone. Especially when I am using my laptop on my bed, i don't like a usb cable connecting to the external hard drive hanging from my laptop. I don't want to connect the tablet to my computer and copy a movie in before i can watch it.

I am not really interested in other dropbox like features that WD MY CLOUD offers. I don't want to expose my files to the Internet at all when WD claims to have high security and encryption features.

So how can i solve my problem. Do i buy a wireless router for myself and WD My Cloud and would that solves my problem. If I do that, do I need to keep switching wireless connection whenever i want internet access?

I found another interesting product from SanDisk and wondering all I want is a bigger version of this. Bigger i mean like 2TB or 4TB. They only do 64GB at the moment. (but even that, would i have the problem of keep switching wireless connection - one for home WIFI and one for the storage?)

I believe there must be a neater solution for my problem. I believe my problem is a common and I hope someone can give me good advice. My budget is up to 250£ for 2 to 4 TB storage. Thanks.

Answers

edvinas.me

I would get a WiFi router with Ethernet ports and USB port. You can get these and it will allow you to connect USB HDD to it and then setup sharing. Now all the computers connected to this WiFi router should have access to external HDD.

To solve the problem of having internet connection while connected to your own router, you will have to connect the 2 routers together (e.g. via UTP cable). By default, this should create two separate networks so the devices on your House router shouldn't see your own private network that is created by your new router. The internet should still work on your new network also, without much extra configuration.

There is also a possibility to configure them to work together (on the same network), so all the devices can see each other (and the shared USB), no matter which router they are connected to. For this, you will have to configure your new router to use the same IP address space as your current one and either disable DHCP server or configure it in accordance to current router / network.

smc

The easiest solution is to buy a router that has USB port for storage devices as suggested by edvinas.me. Note that some devices that have USB port will only support USB printers, so read the description carefully before purchasing the router. I can recommend these two units:

Don't consider this as advertising, please. I just recommend these two models as a reference to what kind of product to look for.

I have used my external WD Hard Disk (1TB) with my wireless router Huawei HG533 for over a year now and I am very pleased with the results. However, keep in mind that you will never achieve great performance from such setup. Even though the WiFi transfer speed is great, the bottleneck for all transfers will be the USB Read/Write speed of the router. In my case, playing music an movies from the router is Ok, maximal speeds I can achieve is about 2MB/s. I hope this info is useful.

Also, this is exactly the setup I have described in one of my questions: Home network with two routers and just one Wifi. You might find it interesting.

Related Answers

Col

Unfortunately the situation isn't that simple when it comes to programs. Most modern windows software will write to the registry when it is installed unless it is specifically described as portable. I'd generally stick to just having data on the external hard drive, I wouldn't even suggest moving your My Documents folder onto it unless you can guarantee never wanting to run your PC without it connected since windows will probably get upset if you do.

I'd generally only recommend using external drives for backup or archiving purposes. As such one large partition is fine for this subdivided into folders. The problem I've found with partitioning is that you never seem to get the sizes right and resizing partitions although easier than it used to be is something to be avoided.

Ruben Schade

Generally speaking external drives don't have the throughput to run software as quickly as you would run it from your laptop's internal drive. That said, many so called "portable" versions of applications do exist which can be run from external drives; PortableApps is the best resource. Running Firefox in this way for example lets you keep all your bookmarks and preferences from machine to machine.

Personally, I'd advise not partitioning external drives with multiple partitions. From experience I'd always "eject" one of the partitions and forget to eject the other before physically unplugging the unit, which can cause data loss. If you're less absent minded than me though, fire away :)

Your primary concern would probably be be which file system to use, and it largely depends on the machines you'll be using it with. Provided you'll be using it with Windows XP, Vista and 7 computers, you can get away with just using one partition and NTFS for maximum reliability and performance.

Partitioning tools exist in Windows 2000 and later under Administrative Tools → Computer Management → Storage → Disk Management. If this doesn't work (rare, but not not unheard of), PartedMagic is a free, bootable Linux distribution with very simple to use graphical partitioning tools. As with any hard drive operations though, remember to back up your data before attempting anything!

alex

Find Disk Management in Administrative Tools. That should help you partition your hard drive. The best thing is that it's built in in Windows and it's free.

Nick Josevski

My advice is generally to partition in 2 parts; 1 NTFS and 1 FAT32.

NTFS - To be able to store large files (4gb+)

FAT32 - To be compatible with other devices that generally don't support NTFS - e.g XBOX 360

Generally 50/50% split works well.

Windows has built in partitioning tools:

Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management

Right click on device and select 'New Simple Volume'

Manos Dilaverakis

You should partition when there is a need to partition. Otherwise just use folders, especially on an external drive where you don't have to worry about separating your OS(es) from your data.

The only reason I ever had to partition an external drive was to use it as a backup for my PC HDD. I'd use some image program (for example Acronis) to make an exact copy of my C:\ drive and then use the rest of the disk for data. That way if anything where to happen to my PC HDD, I'd just swap the disks and be up and running in 5 minutes.

Only other reason I can think of is if you want to have an encrypted partition with TrueCrypt, but it's not exactly something the average person does.