Using a USB drive on an ethernet network

[mycroftt]

OK - here's a question for all you network mavens.

I have a 400 gig USB hard drive that I use for backups and storage of music and pictures. It works fine via any USB port on our home laptops. My problem is that I want to set it up as a network drive and my network is ethernet running on a wireless Linksys router. I need some kind of server or other device to connect to the router and act as a USB hub so I can connect the drive there and have it accessible by all the laptops on the network. I want to spend as little as possible and I don't want to suffer from incredibly slow communications with the drive. This drive is probably the only USB device I will want to connect in this manner so I don't need a multiple port USB hub.

Any suggestions?

 

[bladefixation2]

You need a NAS box with USB ports for expansion. All the NAS boxes ive seen have hard drives in them already and the USB nports are just there to expand. they arent cheap either

http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/MSS_II/

You can get some cheap NAS boxes that come as an empty shell that you fit your own hard drives into. They would be ATA or SATA hard drives that would fit in though. Although there will be an ATA or SATA hard drive inside your usb enclosure i would buy a new one rather than trying to take it to bits

 

[flava]

Easiest would be to connect it to one of your computers (one that has USB2 so it doesn't limit the drive acces rate at 10Mbps) and share it for the whole network. You'll have to turn this computer on when you want to see the drive from the others, of course.
I know somebody who uses this method, whith a tweak. He has a huge TrueCrypt volume (the whole drive) that is mounted when he needs to access the data, and the drive is shared. This way, when the drive is disconnected the volume is unmounted and nobody can get the data.