Does this exist?

[TheGeekFreek]

Not sure what to call this other than a network storage bridge but I cant find anything quite like it. Just for a personal science project to get more use out of my home lab while giving devices failover capabilities of the lab. Tired of dedicating physical drives to each appliance and having no health statistics or regulated backups or redundancy.

USB device (3/3.1 preferred), that emulates a physical hard drive but can be wireless connected to various LAN network storage devices. iSCSI, direct drive access, VHDX/Virtual drives.
Everything I see works kind of the other way by attaching a USB drive to a network appliance to make the storage available online, but the trouble is that things like TV's and Xboxs are limited in customization and wont see things like that.

Examples for use:
1) Connected to Xbox one on the storage port, wireless connected to a configured network RAID set for games OR a virtual disk.
2) Projector that can play movies from a hard drive, connected to my plex storage drive.



*pcloud, clevx, cloud-usb do this as a service to other cloud services. I need local storage.
*CloudFTP requires the storage attached to the device. not what im looking for.
* IMDISK/Arsenal Image Mounter might be the software that can do this, requires hardware. maybe PI?

 

[defaultluser]

The market for such a device is very small, which is why it probably does not exist.

Almost all new TVs/projectors support DLNA, so it's better to just buy new.

And modern consoles also support DLNA:

https://www.pocket-lint.com/games/news/xbox/125228-xbox-one-how-to-stream-content-using-dlna

Maye try a NAS? device Not sure if they can be configured to work as local hard drives or not (external USB ), but they have all the other hardware you need to connect remotely.

 

[TheGeekFreek]

The DLNA apps are trash.
VIZIO even removed the Youtube app from my TV through firmware update because they didnt want to support it any more. There is no app store to add Plex so im stuck with a smart TV thats dumb as hell. Had to buy a Firestick just to do the things I wanted my smart TV to do in the first place.
My projector doesnt have wifi so storage has to be physically attached. The Xbox has limited space, even though I upgraded the internal drive to 2TB, now we see things like whats happening to TellTale where the company is going under and the downloads will no longer be available after the 25th so its up to you to basically indefinitely store it.


Even without a server OS or a home lab, this would be a simple way to centralize storage and allow devices to be able to access it from the network even if they were not designed for it.
I dont think my idea is too far out there. Seems like a better solution than just dealing with whatever crap the engineers/dev decide to give you.

 

[Keljian]

Not sure how much storage you need, however, there is an SD card with integrated (albeit weak) wireless.

The Toshiba air W04. You could use a USB3 adapter for one of these and it would work.

 

[TheGeekFreek]

Thanks, checked it out. Neat but not quite what im looking for. That one is limited on storage and is a standalone access point, I kinda need the exact opposite.

I need something that plugs in USB that looks like storage port side, but instead of physical storage it will connect to network storage wirelessly (or wired would also work)

 

[Keljian]

Thanks, checked it out. Neat but not quite what im looking for. That one is limited on storage and is a standalone access point, I kinda need the exact opposite.

I need something that plugs in USB that looks like storage port side, but instead of physical storage it will connect to network storage wirelessly (or wired would also work)

No it can work like a standalone access point, in my case it isn't.. it's acting as a client on my network, with wireless network storage.. The limited storage is the issue.

 

[SamirD]

There are devices like this that basically allow the usb signal to go over ethernet. But they are not plug and play and most of the time require drivers which won't work in your situation. There might possibly be some devices that do not require a driver to connect to industrial devices, but I don't expect those to be cheap (think hundreds of dollars).