Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Network Attached Storage Solution

I have just recently found a relatively inexpensive way to create an NAS (network attached storage) for my home LAN. Most NAS drives are rather expensive. I had a 500GB Western Digital external USB drive that I wanted to serve as a media streaming/central storage area for iTunes as well as a place to exchange files on my home network and backup to for the Macs and the Thinkpad my wife uses.

My solution has been the SimpleTech SimpleNET NAS Head
USB 2.0 Portable Dongle. It is relatively inexpensive, allows 2 USB drives to be attached, and connects by a single 100TX ethernet connection to my network.

The only drawback seems to be that it won't work if the drive is formatted as HFS+, it has to be NTFS. Then it works nicely.

I thought I'd post this for any who were in my boat and couldn't find a simple solution for network drives.

the "free" solution others use is simply plug it into one of your computers on the lan and turn on file sharing.

This doesn't require any other computer to be on, besides the one accessing the drives. It is a server. It also removes any overhead on a hosting computer through sharing.