Network drive

330d

Can anyone reccomend me a good/cheap network drive that is compatible with windows 7?

I bought an NAS enclosure from ebay for £25 but its not the best to be honest, not very stable.

Then bought a Netgear sc101 which is not compatible with windows 7 64bit.

All the ones i have seen seem to be over 500gb, i only need less than 100gb.

Or im sure i have seen wireless routers that have a USB on the back that allows me to share files, any idea on what model these routers are?

Ideally, i would like a good NAS enclosure that i can use my own 100gb hard drive.

John_Gray

You may be confused about the difference between an external (usually USB-connected) hard drive, and Network Attached Storage.

An external hard drive just needs to be plugged into a USB port on your PC or laptop, and appears as a new drive letter.

A NAS box is altogether more complicated, usually running something like Linux on its own CPU, and with the hard disk(s) formatted using one of the Linux file systems like ext3, ext4 or ZFS. This box is make to look like a network share by an emulation program like Samba, which presents to Windows the appearance of being an NTFS-formatted share (with certain usually unimportant differences). The NAS box is ethernet-connected but all you can do it to treat it as a hard drive, but network-shared.

That's why NAS boxes are more complicated and more expensive than ordinary external hard drives.

Both should all be compatible with any Windows operating system from XP upwards, and with 32-bit or 64-bit variants.

330d

Thanks, you seem to of confused me.

I had this first and it was exactly what i wanted, http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/3-5-IDE-NAS-NETWORK-STORAGE-ENCLOSURE-/110589360651?pt=UK_Collectables_HardDriveEnclosures_RL&hash=item19bfa3ba0b

Only problem it was not stable enough and kept crashing. It allowed me to share and view my files over my home network.

I want something like that again but abit better quality.

alanwsg

I recently got one of these, been fine so far.
The people there were very helpful as well (I had a Iomega drive that blew up and needed to get the HD out of it and fit it into one of these caddies to regain my files).

But NOTE, this takes SATA drives, not IDE.

http://www.smalldrives.com/external-enclosures-32/lan-server-drive-no-hdd-installed-157.html

330d

alanwsg wrote: »

I recently got one of these, been fine so far.
The people there were very helpful as well.

http://www.smalldrives.com/external-enclosures-32/lan-server-drive-no-hdd-installed-157.html

That is almost identical to the one i got first.

But when i connect it wirelessly to mt satellite dreambox, its not very stable.

kwikbreaks

Unless your NAS actually has a wifi connection then it is almost certainly not the cause of your problems. I used a cheap NAS enclosure for ages with no problems at all as did the other poster. I think you need to look at the WiFi part of your connection rather than the ethernet which your NAS box uses.

DVardysShadow

imr4n wrote: »

Can anyone reccomend me a good/cheap network drive that is compatible with windows 7?

I bought an NAS enclosure from ebay for £25 but its not the best to be honest, not very stable.

Then bought a Netgear sc101 which is not compatible with windows 7 64bit.

All the ones i have seen seem to be over 500gb, i only need less than 100gb.

Or im sure i have seen wireless routers that have a USB on the back that allows me to share files, any idea on what model these routers are?

Ideally, i would like a good NAS enclosure that i can use my own 100gb hard drive.

Network drives do not have compatibility or not with windows 7. Once the storage is on a network it is completely Operating System agnostic. It only needs to be NFS compatible [for linux and unix networks] or CIFS compatible [for Linux, unix and windows networks].

Problems arise from being wrongly configured or bad products.

smcaul

Actually, WIN7 does have problems with NAS drives, it does not show them in network devices where you would normally see them, you often have to actually know the path to them and then map them, this is well known and documented on the web!!!

I use 3 NAS's on my network as well as an old PC set up as a file server, only the fileserver is seen by WIN 7 none of the NAS's were, they all had to be set up using drive mapping, one is a freecom, one a d'link and I forget what the third one is!!

So you may well find that whatever NAS you get you will still find the same issue unless you map the drive.

330d

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Unless your NAS actually has a wifi connection then it is almost certainly not the cause of your problems. I used a cheap NAS enclosure for ages with no problems at all as did the other poster. I think you need to look at the WiFi part of your connection rather than the ethernet which your NAS box uses.

The NAS drives works almost perfectly other than it has issues with my satellite dreambox.

Once connected the the router, i can view/edit/add/files on the hard drive from any pc or laptop in the house.

To see what was the problem, i created a share folder on my desktop and it worked perfectly with my dreambox.

So this has led me to believe there something wrong or incompatible with my NAS drive.

330d

DVardysShadow wrote: »

Network drives do not have compatibility or not with windows 7. Once the storage is on a network it is completely Operating System agnostic. It only needs to be NFS compatible [for linux and unix networks] or CIFS compatible [for Linux, unix and windows networks].

Problems arise from being wrongly configured or bad products.

Thats exactly what i thought, the Netgear Sc101 comes with software that requires it for setup. But the software is not compatible with windows 7 64bit.

I dont see why all this has to be done as my other eaby NAs drive was so easy to setup. Just plug it into the router and it automatically asighns an IP to it. This was so easy.

Seems like the Netgear is so much more complicated.

330d

smcaul wrote: »

Actually, WIN7 does have problems with NAS drives, it does not show them in network devices where you would normally see them, you often have to actually know the path to them and then map them, this is well known and documented on the web!!!

I use 3 NAS's on my network as well as an old PC set up as a file server, only the fileserver is seen by WIN 7 none of the NAS's were, they all had to be set up using drive mapping, one is a freecom, one a d'link and I forget what the third one is!!

So you may well find that whatever NAS you get you will still find the same issue unless you map the drive.

Yes thanks, i do know about the mapping. As mentioned, i had the ebay NAS mapped on my computers and it worked well.

As before, the dreambox had isses with it though.