How do I use an USB external hard-drive as a network drive.

[sm.amudhan]

I have one Wifi Modem router with 4LAN ports,1 USB ports and a Wifi antenna...I run Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on one computer and Ubuntu 11.04 on the laptop..I want to use an external USB drive as my network drive.The make and model of the hard-drive is "Transcend storejet 25P(320GB)" I have accidentally deleted the storejet software and now i want to use that as a network drive...Plugging it simply into the modem's USB port won't work,I use the modem my ISP has provided me with..I want to use this network drive as i don't have a PC that is on 24/7.. I should be able to access this drive via Wifi as well..."HOW DO I ACCOMPLISH THIS??"

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!!

(P.S.--I don't want to spend any money on this)

[sm.amudhan]

I have one Wifi Modem router with 4LAN ports,1 USB ports and a Wifi antenna...I run Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit on one computer and Ubuntu 11.04 on the laptop..I want to use an external USB drive as my network drive.The make and model of the hard-drive is "Transcend storejet 25P(320GB)" I have accidentally deleted the storejet software and now i want to use that as a network drive...Plugging it simply into the modem's USB port won't work,I use the modem my ISP has provided me with..I want to use this network drive as i don't have a PC that is on 24/7.. I should be able to access this drive via Wifi as well..."HOW DO I ACCOMPLISH THIS??"

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!!

(P.S.--I don't want to spend any money on this)

I also want to access the drive when the PC is off also..

[rubberman]

What are the specs for this drive - size, partitions, formatting, etc? What do the modem/router's docs say about plugging in USB drives?

[sm.amudhan]

The specs are:
Transcend storejet 25P
320GB
1 Partition(usable 297GB)
Formatting NTFS

There isn't anything about plugging in a usb harddrive in the modem's docs.

(P.S. I don't mind re-formatting the drive to a different file system)

[rubberman]

My guess is that the router will not deal with NTFS file systems. Try reformatting to either fat-32, or ext2 or ext3. Most consumer routers run a variant of Linux, for which ext2, ext3, or possibly xfs or jfs support is built into the OS. So, try ext2. If that works, then try ext3 (more efficient, faster to recover from crashes). If either of those work, then try xfs and/or jfs. The ext3, xfs, and jfs file systems are journaled file systems that recover quickly from system failures. I have embedded systems that support jfs, and NAS arrays that support xfs. Anyway, changing the file system is a fast operation (relatively), so testing all of these to see what works should not be an unreasonable exercise, and informative. If all of the Linux-capable besides fat-32 don't work, then use fat-32, which while fine for simple data storage, doesn't support Linux user/group/permission metadata so you can't execute programs from it, for example.

[sm.amudhan]

I'm planning to format it to FAT32 but will I be able to password protect the access and access it on Ubuntu(11.04 Classic desktop) and windows(7 Ultimate 64 bit)....