I recently spent $40 on a great little device that has transformed my external hard drive into a wireless network drive. My ever expanding collection of electronic gadgets has meant the tangled mess of wires in my home is growing bigger by the day. Here is how I’ve started to cut the wires from my life….
The Problem I Had
I have an ever expanding collection of media: photographs (mainly in RAW format), music, video etc. Recently it became un-manageable storing all of this data on my laptop as I was quickly running out of space.
I recently decided to move all of my media onto and external hard drive, freeing up some much needed space on my laptop. Doing this meant I was able to keep all of my content in one place and also made a considerable improvement to the performance of my laptop.
image by stuant63
The problem I was left with was that every time I wanted to access any of my media (including my photographs) I had to plug in my external hard drive to my laptop. This meant I was constantly moving the external hard drive around (as i work in different parts of the house), spending lots of time fiddling around with power cables and usb leads to the laptop.
The Solution
I wanted to find a way to make my external hard drive wireless so I could leave it in one place and access the content from anywhere in my home, with any laptop or computer. After a bit of digging around and searching the net I eventually found a cheap, easy to use solution: The Addonic NAS Adapter.
This is a small device that allows you to connect any USB device (in my case my external hard drive) to your wireless broadband router. The device then becomes available to access over your home wireless network. This means that I can now access any of the files on my external hard drive via a wireless connection, via multiple laptops or computers.
I simply leave the hard drive plugged in to my wireless broadband router and can access my files on it from any computer or laptop in my house, from any room.
Installing the NAS Adaptor was very simple. The device came with some easy to follow instructions and i also found a very clear step by step set up guide here.
It uses little power and also has the ability to sleep/wake up my external hard drive during periods of inactivity. Although it is early days I can’t really find anything negative to say about this device.
In addition the NAS Adapter to this core functionality the Addonics has many other features i’ve not played with including:
- The ability to let other external devices such as an XBOX 360 or Nintendo Wii access your files (great for watching video files)
- The ability to act as a FTP server meaning you can potentially access your files on your external drive from anywhere in the world with an internet connection
- You can control which users on your network have access to which directories (read/write access)
- You can use the device as a printer server (attach any usb printer to your wireless network)
There are various other ways to connect an external hard drive to a wireless network but they are all a lot more expensive than this great little device. It is easy to install, has a low power consumption, allows me to access all of my photographs (and other media) via wireless from anywhere in my home. It has turned by external drive into a wireless external hard drive! For about $40 this thing is a bargain.
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