How to share my media files from USB external Hard Disk on to my wifi / any adapters available

Question

I am trying to connect my external USB powered USB hard drives (1TB) and various other capacities of USB HDD containing various media files including videos and music on my home wireless network. I want to access this from any of my devices including my Android Phone, Tablet, my Mac or from my Windows 8 Laptop. At the same time, I don't want to connect the USB HDD to any of this device physically which will require one of the connected machines to be running all the time. Instead, I need a solution like in recent times there are USB external HDD with wireless capabilities, so is there something like an wireless adapter to which I can connect my HDD so that it is available all the time?

thanks in advance! S

Solution 1

The Netgear WNDR4500 has two USB ports on the back which will accept storage devices and you will be able to access them from the network by either mapping it or manually entering \\readyshare\hdd_name

I am sure there are cheaper routers that do this but I am extremely satisfied with my WNDR4500

You can also look into something like a USB NAS adapter: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392221,00.asp

Solution 2

Check if this link can give you some help:

HDD sharing

Comments

[Ashildr]

Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the target site is unreachable or goes permanently offline.