Jessica wants to setup her external hard drive so that she can access it from her any computer in her house through her network, but doesn’t know how to do it. Hosts of Deemable Tech, Ray Hollister and Tom Braun, help her out. Listen to this week’s Ask Deemable Tech.

TRANSCRIPT

RAY: Hi, I’m Ray Hollister,

TOM: I’m Tom Braun,

RAY: and we’re the hosts of Deemable Tech. On the show, we answer your questions about computers, tablets, mobile phones and the internet, like this question:

TOM: Jessica writes:

I have a desktop and a laptop, networked together using my wireless router and the Windows networking stuff. I set it up so they could see each other and share a few folders, and my laptop could see the external hard drive hooked up to the desktop. It was basically the result of me pushing buttons until it worked. I really don’t know anything about networks! I like the way it works, except it’s inconvenient to have to have the desktop turned on to let my laptop get at the stuff on my external hard drive. Is there a way to hook my external hard drive up to… something so that it can be on the network *without* the desktop and just magically work?

Thanks for your email, Jessica. What you are wanting to do is turn your external hard drive into what is called a network hard drive. There are a couple of ways to do this. One, as you already know, is to set it up on your desktop as a shared folder. As you mentioned, the problem with that is that you have to keep that computer on if you want to access the files on any other computer.

There was something that came out a few years ago that was supposed to solve this problem called the Pogoplug.

TOM: That sounds cute.

RAY: It was a cute little device that ran for about $50 and the way it worked was that you plugged it into the wall, plugged it into your router, and plugged your external hard drive into it and voila, you had a network hard drive! You could even access your files online and on the iPad and iPhone.

TOM: OK, so problem solved, right?

RAY: The problem was that it didn’t work quite as easily as expected when it first came out, and there were some hardware problems with it too. The company still sells the device, but they mostly focus on Internet based cloud storage now.

It probably was a good thing that the company changed its focus too, because there’s another way to do this that makes the Pogoplug look pretty irrelevant and that is directly through your network router. A lot of newer Wi-Fi routers, including D-Link, Netgear, Linksys, and Apple’s routers, have USB ports on them so that you can plug an external hard drive into it, and it becomes a shared hard drive on your network. Or, you can plug a printer into the router and it becomes a shared printer on your network.

So, my suggestion to you would be to check your Wi-Fi router and see if it has a USB port. If it does, check the manual or look on the manufacturer’s website to see how to setup an external hard drive as a shared hard drive on your router. If it doesn’t, maybe it’s time to consider getting a new router. Just make sure that it says on the box that it has one or more USB ports, and that you can plug an external hard drive into it.

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TOM: To hear more answers to questions like Jessica’s listen to our show at Deemable dot com, that’s D-E E-M A-B-L-E dot com. There you can listen to all of our previous episodes and subscribe to our podcast.

RAY: If you have a question for Deemable Tech give us a call us at 1-888-972-9868, or you can send us an email at questions@deemable.com. For Deemable Tech I’m Ray Hollister,

TOM: and I’m Tom Braun.