Seting up External Hard Drive on home network

Ok I have just acquired the new MacBook Pro and am in the process of painfully converting everything from PC to Mac.

My flatmate has an airport extreme base station which we connect to for our internet. Before he moved in, I was using the Thompson wireless router that my ISP supplies.

Now I am a hater on wires and having to have my huge TB external plugged into my PC constantly was annoying.

I know the base stations have input for externals and this works fine when plugged into my flatemates base station however the base station lives in his room and don't really want to put my external in his room.

Rather than spend $300NZD on another base station for my room, i thought about buying a NAS USB hub to plug into the thompson router, for significantly cheaper and setting up a seperate network in my room for my external that can be tucked away under my bed.

My questions is, can my macbook be connected to two networks at the same time (one for the internet and one for the NAS/external hard drive).

If I can't connect to two networks, can i link thru to the Thompson router via the airport base station purely just to access my external HD?

Thanks in advance for your help!!!

theagent - as long as the Thomson has a usb port (sorry, don't know if it has or not) for you to mount your nas drive on, you will be able to to navigate to it via Finder>go>connect to server on your MBP (via AFP/SMB protocols) - assign it its own static ip address through the router for best results..

You can alway setup another SSID on the router as well, that is unique from your flatmate's/existing network, and isolate yourself and external!

Let us know how you get on....