Connect to external drive wirelessly, securely, and easily

Question

I'm moving from using a laptop as my sole computer (MBP, early 2011) to having two active computers (the MBP and an iMac). Instead of keeping all my data on my MBP, I'd like it all on an external drive that:

1. I can access wirelessly in my home, or connect to directly (e.g., for fast speeds when video editing)
2. That preferably takes advantage of my current external drive (a pair of 3 TB drives in a RAID enclosure)
3. That I could login to from anywhere with Wifi (optional, but would be handy)
4. Is very secure and private
5. Is very straightforward and fast to setup and maintain
6. Cheap (a few hundred max)

So far, I've considered a NAS, a Mac mini as server, or even just turning on the file sharing options in OS X. Any thoughts or ideas on these or other solutions would be terrific. Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

There are very cheap routers out there with usb ports, (eg. TPLink WR703N) your current router might even have one, you can plug an drive right there, they usually include some kind of software or you access it by the right ip address.

There are a ton of NAS solution out there from the WD mycloud dual bay to more slots, those being very plug and play. You can also get any old dumpster computer and install freeNAS on it, very easy aswell, alot of tutorials out there. You can ofcourse enable access over the web but if its trivial for you then just don't do it so that you don't have to worry more about security.