Connect a hard drive to router?

I'm a tech beginner. I have an Actiontec router on my FIOS system. Can I connect a hard drive directly to the router and see it with multiple computers if it's not a network drive with it's own networking drivers built in? I have two USB drives available. If yes, where can I find out how to do it? Thanks for suggestions and please forgive me if this is a really dumb question.

Brian

Accepted answers

smith6612

To tie onto the above post, what you would need to do for the USB drives is to find a NAS device that allows the linking of USB devices, or you would need to use a PC to share the drives. That would be at least as a temporary solution until the Verizon router support USB drives.

All comments

somegirl

Short answer is no.

Longer answer is that it's theoretically possible with today's technology, but Verizon's router firmware doesn't support it. You could buy a third-party router that might support it, but don't expect Verizon support to be much help with the set-up or maintenance.

smith6612

Brian

I expected this response. I have two laptops and a desktop with one large drive connected all the time. It's a powerhouse kit I assembled running Win 7. Before I built that I had a desktop running Win XP Pro, as do my laptops, and I had a wireless home lan where each machine could read files and drives on the other machines. But Win7 won't talk to the XP machines in the same way without server software sitting between, as far as I can tell. I have not found a way for the Win 7 to permit file sharing with XP machines. Thanks for your help. If I upgrade the laptops to Win 7 (one is definitely capable, not sure about the second) I would be just fine again.

Anti-Phish1

As Somegirl and Smith6612 said, you can't connect a USB drive to the VZ router.

However, it's perfectly possible to attach the drives to one of your computers and share files between WIndows XP and Windows 7.

See this Microsoft KB article:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Networking-home-computers-running-different-versions-of-Windows

tns

There are such things as network drives that can be directly connect to an ethernet. Essentially a small OS that manages the drive, but they are not common. Not as cheap but not out of sight prices. And i/o speed is often faster than on a USB connection.

Examples

http://store.westerndigital.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/parentCategoryID.13092300/categoryID.13092900

But as the original poster asked, regular USB connected drives need something to manage them and cannot just be hooked to a typical router and certainly not to the FIOS Actiontec routers.

ukbritt

I have a Buffalo Technology Terastation 2 TB directly connected via Ethernet to the FIOS router..like previous poster said..much faster than USB

Brian

thanks for the link to the video. I have only partially succeeded in connecting my Win 7 desktop and my WinXP laptop. The desktop, which is connected to the FIOS router via ethernet, sees the XP laptop and files, but I can't get the laptop to see the desktop at all. I've carefully following the video to create the network, matched network names, etc., but the network does not appear on the laptop at all. The laptop is wireless to the Router. Any ideas about why the network is one way only?

jimcobber

Many wireless access points offer a file sharing feature. I am using an Apple Airport Extreme to host a USB hard drive. It is very handy to have, I have all the household computers mapped to it and use it for backup, file sharing and so forth. It works great for both Mac and Win7 computers.