Hey guys,
I purchased an external hard drive a couple months ago. 160GB at a really good price I am happy with the purchase. I use it to back up all the files from computers on my network. The only problem is that I have to connect each computer individually to the hard drive to save the files to it which gets a little bit annoying at times especially when you need to save or retrieve files regularly. K back to the hard drive it uses a fire wire cable connection that connects to the laptops on my network. And I was trying to figure out a process to make my tasks a little bit easer and also for others on my network as far as accessing and saving files to the external hard drive. I was thinking since my network is wireless may be I can some how link the hard drive to the router. Kind of like a personal network server. That sound good but not sure if it’s possible but I am excited about this project.

Do you guys/girls have any ideas or advice that will help me accomplish this? Any advice will be appreciated
Thanks in advance.
Kpack

Someone pls respond. Tell me if my idea is do able or not.

I also had that problem with my backups but now I have purchased an external USB casing for the backup hard drive. So I can take it on or off whenever I want. I've heard about the network hard drives that are standalone but they're way too expensive.

thanks for the info.

Two ways.

1) Plug it into PC A and have it share the drive.
2) Buy a network enclosure.

Here are two such network enclosures:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817145385
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817348011

bad idea. backing up lots of info on wifi is a long and excruciating process.
on a wired network though, it would be very easy - just connect the hdd to a pc, share it, and dump whatever you need to backup through the network to that share

How does the network enclosure work. Matter fact how will it work with my network? I use a fire wire connection from my external hard drive to my notebook.

The enclosures I linked are wired. You would plug them in, via Ethernet, to your router/gateway/switch/hub. If you are merely networking off of a wireless access point (AP), then things are a tad harder. Not sure if they have wired ports or not.

I do not own nor operate a network enclosure, so I do not have first hand experience. Sorry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nas
this is the enclosure, to make things simple

Actually, I forgot to take into account your mention of the firewire. The enclosures are for internal drives to make them external.

My apologies for the confusion.

Sounds like your solution is to plug external drive into PC A, via firewire, and have it share the drive for the others.

Dima: Your wikipedia link is incorrect and NAS does not really make this topic any simpler.