Home Networking: The Missing Manual

Adding Storage to Your Network

Have you ever gotten to a point where you need to dump files and programs from your hard drive because it was getting full? Have you ever found yourself needing to grab a document from another computer, but you can't get to it because the computer it lives on is turned off? There's an easy answer to storage dilemmas like these: add more of it, and make the space available to everyone, all the time, from every PC on your network.

In this section, you'll learn how to add storage to your home network by connecting additional USB hard drives to your router. Using the Linksys Network Storage Link, you can connect USB-based hard drives directly to your network. You just need a Network Storage Link (which sells for less than $100), a spare USB external hard drive or two, and some USB and Ethernet cables. You connect the Storage Link to your router, then connect your USB disks to the Network Storage Link. After you configure the Storage Link, those USB drives show up as shared drives on your network, which everyone can use. And best of all the Storage Link supports both Macintosh and Windows computers.

Note

Network-based storage drives are not completely without drawbacks. The primary problem plaguing network-attached hard drives is performance, or rather, speed. Even though you use the same type of hard drives you'd attach to your computer, you're not able to transfer data to and fro quite as fast as you would if the hard drive was attached directly to a computer. ...