External Hard Drives

Lynton

Lynton

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Lynton (yes really!)
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OK so I am in the market for an additional external hard drive, and given that the current 2 are

Seagate 1Tb

Seagate portable 250 Gb,

I'll probably stick to that brand.


Am I correct in my understanding that the new super duper ones hook up to your network and you can access the drive from any pc anywhere - or am I misinterpreting that?

Also I understand that there is a bit of a shortage at the moment due to the 2011 floods in Thailand, however the prices seem to have taken another hike in January???????
 
A Network Attached Storage (NAS) device looks a bit like an external drive but it is actually a mini computer that sits on your network sharing its hard drive(s). Some have USB sockets so you can plug external drives into it for more storage. Don't know if any can act as a USB external drive to plug in to a PC but I'd have thought it unlikely.
 
Another option is an apple airport extreme where you can add a external drive via USB, and share the drive on your network.
 
Oll said:
Another option is an apple airport extreme where you can add a external drive via USB, and share the drive on your network.
Click to expand...

Excuse my general ignorance IT wise (if I break it, I get a mate to fix it) will this work with PC's (not apple macs ipads etc etc)... I can see no reason why it shouldn't but I am a bit of a technophobe once it gets past plugging things in....
 
Rather than possibly confuse things with apple and PC questions, what is it you want to do exactly?
 
Exactly? And I may well be dancing with the fairies at this............

At a minimum...... I would like somekind of external drive of a couple of Tb at least that could "talk" to the network in my house, i.e. my desktop, the Wife's laptop, anything else logged onto the secure wifi could upload and download from it.........

what would be a bonus, is my desktop at work, over internet , could hook into it and uploada pic if i asked (nicely)
 
Buffalo NAS thingies are supposed to be quite good. You have multiple drives in them so you can do mirroring so if one drive fails completely you don't lose data. Ideally you'd want different brands if you were paranoid.... works with pc and mac as far as I know.

I was looking at getting one then decided I'd have online back up instead.
 
Im a newbie to this forum but an IT engineer by trade.

You can use a NAS drive on either pc or mac, they connect via a network cable into any of the ports on your router or hub.

You can make folders on them and share them across your network easily, you can remotely log into them from anywhere in the world with a broadband connection.

The better ones have two hard drives that mirror the data between them so in effect you only see one drive but you have a complete copy on the other.

I have a Netgear NAS Duo which has 2x 2TB drives in, it does have a usb on the front which can be used for external drives.

Downside is that they are easy enough to install but configuration can be tricky, the life saver is the forums which seem to have most of the answers that you may need in configuration. You may need to know about port forwarding and have a good knowledge of ip addressing to get into the depths of it.

Hope this helps
 
Russ77 said:
Lyton, take a look here http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=381370 if you haven't already ;)
Click to expand...

thats what i was going to say, some NAS discussed in detail in there :)

regarding remote access, that is possible too. thats what i do with my synology. either via the web interface (open port 5000 on your router) or FTP (open port 21 on your router) but youll need something like dyndns to give your home internet a static name (free service).
 
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