External Hard Drive to HH

Maybe be a silly question, but is it easy enough to set up an external hard drive and attach directly to the home hub.

Reason being, I have a wired ethernet connection from my main PC to the HH, and a laptop that uses wireless to the homehub.

So far I have managed to set up a network ok, but have to rely on the PC being switched on to get files from the PC.

However, I am wondering If I connected an external hard drive and transferred my pics/movies/music etc that I have on my PC to this, then in theory both the Laptop and PC can access it seperately without being reliant on the PC acting as a server....


In short is it possible, and has anyone else done it?????


thanks in advance

I have done just that.

Connect a USB hard disk to the USB-A connection on the HH
The disk has to be formatted as a FAT32 partition(biggest file size 4GB) as it will not be recognised if it is NTFS.

The drive then appears as a share \\Thomson\BT_7G which you can map a drive letter to if you want.

Cheers mate....

Answered to my satisfaction, didn't want to go buy an external HDD if it weren't possible.


If you were in my vacinity you would have just won yourself a pint

so in reallity you will have to take a vertual one

\~~~/
I. . .I
I___I

Best I could do that, not used to doing silly pictures like that!!

Sorry to butt in guys. This sounds great but i have a question -

once the external hardrive is connected to my home hub can I see the contents on my main pc and have the same easy access to files as if the external hd was connected directly to my pc ?

thanks

Yes, you can access it from any PC connected to the HH, wireless or wired.

Just enter \\Thomson\BT_7G into the address bar of any explorer window or map a network drive.

ah thats great. Cheers for the info.

Hi another interested user here i have a Modem /router with usb and ethernet connections would the same apply to me. In other words would this setup you are talking about with the H Hub work for other modem/routers. Can i connect a usb external hard drive direct to the modem/router.

would depend on the chipset and OS the router was running I guess - as they are usually based on a custom linux install then in theory they should be able to share a drive connected to the USB port, in practise probably most don't implement this feature... many lack a USB-A port too, even if they would support such a feature in the OS.

you'd get better results buying a dedicated NAS box imo, or a network enclosure and putting a drive of your own in it...

Edited by deleted (Fri 29-Dec-06 06:51:10)

My external drive worked untill i upgraded to software 6.2.2.6

I managed to get this to work with the 6.2.2.6 software , thanks for a great piece of info !

Cheers
Gordon

Edited by Ardbeggordon (Mon 01-Jan-07 22:03:28)