I want to connect a hard drive to my ethernet router. What should I buy?

Question

I have several computers in the house that share the ethernet network. I would like to have a hard drive that would be accessible from any computer. I tried the Western Digital My Book World drive, but it's too darn slow. Are there alternatives? I would like to keep it under $300

Answer 1

LaCie Ethernet Disk Mini, or Ethernet Disk Big Disk. 500GB should run about $210; 1TB should run about $300. You can buy directly from LaCie, though Pc connection has good prices on these. I'm using an ethernet disk mini I bought over a year ago at home, and I'm quite happy with its performance over fast ethernet.

Answer 2

Performance
Despite the ease with which you can access and share files remotely, the Western Digital MyBook World Edition unfortunately falls a bit short with data transfer speeds. Over a local network, the drive took 31 minutes, 30 seconds to write a 5GB folder of mixed file types, and 30 minutes, 13 seconds to read it back. The next slowest drive to write the folder--the Buffalo TeraStation Home Server--was still five minutes faster with that task. If the easy remote access is important to you and you can live with the slow transfer speeds, this drive is a good choice. But if you need faster transfers, check out the HP Media Vault.

I preffer Buffalo but its up to you :0

Answer 3

Put your computers on a LAN and add the hard drive to any computer, then share the hard drive. It will be usable from any machine.