Fred Langa: “What’s the cheapest way to network an external hard drive?”

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Fred says, “How about $0.00?” If that surprises you, check out Fred’s latest column on Langa.com.
[See the full post at: Fred Langa: “What’s the cheapest way to network an external hard drive?”]

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Elly, GreatAndPowerfulTech

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If you have a router check to see if it has a USB port on the rear and the software supports sharing the drive over your network. This feature is fairly common on mid to high end routers.

It also has a zero cost and you don’t have to keep the one PC the HD would be attached to on all the time.

If you haven’t already purchased your external HD I’d recommend just getting one that plugs into a RJ-45 port on your router like the WD My-Cloud drive series.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Just don’t activate the cloud side of things…

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To add to @RetiredGeek post, if you have an old unused router kicking about, you can also use it if it has a USB port for a storage device completely disconnected from the internet of course alongside your existing router.
Connect via ethernet/ homeplugs for maximum connection efficiency. (Cheap NAS)

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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Langa’s approach is exactly what I do.

I have a fairly extensive collection of downloaded software (including the latest Microsoft updates through WSUS Offline) that I use for tech support and troubleshooting.  I keep all of that on an external drive that I have attached to my primary working machine.  By enabling sharing on that drive, then the content is available to all the other machines in my LAN, both physical and virtual.  If I travel and am working on another machine, I just plug the drive into the other machine.

In fact, I also share the DVD drive on this machine, so that any of the machines in my LAN can get to a DVD, if they don’t have one of their own (and I don’t have to take the effort to rip a disk to ISO, and make sure that other machines have an available tool to read .ISOs)

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Yes, this works, but there are a number of issues:

To allow specific named users to access the shared drive/folder, that user must have an account on the machine that is sharing out the drive/folder.  Not a problem if your network is setup whereby multiple users use multiple machines and all have accounts on each, but if it’s a simple home network of one-user one-computer, then you have to share out the folder/drive to the user “Everyone”, which then has no access security to any machine that is on the network.

Different versions of Windows may have issues sharing with other versions.  Not always, but it can be a pain.  It seems that the Home versions have a greater likelihood of causing issues than the Pro versions.

When I switched a Notebook to dual boot to Linux Mint, I had to setup a Samba share so that my desktop PC could manage files over the network.  Now this is a far better setup in terms of security.  The Samba share allows setting up user groups with particular share access passwords.  This means that you can have different passwords and users with different access control, without having to actually have those accounts on the Linux machine.  I could have UserA on a Win10 desktop PC, UserB on a Win7 laptop PC and a shared folder on LinuxUser Linux laptop PC.  UserA and UserB have different login access to the share, and it can all be managed who has access to what on the Linux Samba share laptop.

But, yes, if you just want to share a drive letter or folder from a Windows PC to the network, it is easy, but you have little security or control over it, beyond global “Everyone” user or whatever accounts exist on the sharing out Windows PC.

This isn’t a Windows 10 thing, it was exactly the same on Windows 7.

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EstherD

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y7u,

Actually, you don’t have to have the same account on all machines you only need to provide the Userid & Password of the machine sharing the drive. When the user attempts to access the share (setup with Authenticated Users permissions) they’ll get a dialog box asking them to sign in, using the afore mentioned credentials, there is even a check box for their machine to remember the credentials so they don’t have to type them in every time.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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@RetiredGeek

Thanks for correcting me.
I recall exactly what you describe, once and only once however.  I had a pair of Windows 7 Pro machines setup and each had a User account which required a password (it wasn’t blank).
I couldn’t add the username of the other Windows PC’s account to the one sharing a folder, it just wouldn’t accept me doing it.  I couldn’t get to grips with home groups and faff.

Now, currently I have blank passwords on the User account on each of the Windows machines in the home.  This won’t let me log into a share, because there is no password to log in with.
So, maybe it could be argued I am to blame for forcing the lack of security.

However, I think the samba share way is just plain nicer.  It’d be great to be able to configure share credentials for a shared folder in Windows, regardless of what users are on different machines.  Wouldn’t matter what user was logged into their actual computer, as long as they had the correct specific credentials they could access the share with those share credentials, and have access to what was defined for their share log in.

Perhaps I need to spend more time reading up on this, and testing it all out on a VM.
As the PC providing the share is running Linux, I am happy with how that works.

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