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

Answer 1

Check if this link can give you some help:

HDD sharing

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

To add to MonkeyZeus' answer, you can also get something like Seagate Wireless Plus which is basically a Wireless NAS. It won't accept your current external HDD of course, but you can copy your content into it and it will do the job.

If you want to re-use your old external HDD, then MonkeyZeus' answer is the correct path. Get a NAS box that has USB support (Netgear ReadyNAS, Synology, QNAP, and lots of other brand out there), and use that.