External HDs

Master_Pain

Master_Pain

Supreme [H]ardness
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Apr 13, 2007
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Is there a way to connect External Hard drives that have a USB or Firewire port directly into a router that only has ethernet ports? I want to get an external to use as a storage drive and just hook it to my router.
 
You would need to get an enclosure that supports ethernet and swap the HDDs into it.
 
there are a couple of devices that do it for USB devices... none that I know of for firewire.

Linksys makes a product called the NSLU2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 - this device has a network port + a few USB ports (don't know how many - guessing two).

Another option would be to get a NAS hard drive that supported adding extra drives - http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822154327
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822100016
Both of the above are the same, just one has a 250 and one a 500 gig internal drive. These will share their built in hard drive plus two hard drives, or their internal hard drive + a printer + one hard drive.

Both of the above options are limited as they don't support gigabit network speeds... but if you don't need blazing fast access to your data or don't have gigabit in your home yet, they are excellent options.

The NSLU2 has quite a following after it + many custom firmwares exist for this device to allow it to do many things... if you're into playing with firmware linux and the like, you'll love this device.
 
Take my advice, setup a cheap server with the drive in there. You will thank me later.

Newegg has some ASUS Terminator C3 barebones for dirt cheap (70bucks) and barley sip on the power consumption.
 
The Linksys is looking like the best route for me. Thanks for the advice boys. And Ockie, I actually delved into your thread last night, you had some crazy setups :p
 
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