Looking to add my 2.5" drive to my network

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Hi, and thanks for reading!

I recently had an idea to keep all of my video files on a separate external hard drive. Now, I wold like to use that same drive as a NAS device. I am going to use itunes to get those files from that drive so that I can use Connect360 to view them on my xbox. I have looked, and looked and I cannot find an enclosure for my 2.5" drive that can get this done for me. I would like to have a gigabit connection, but the 100 mbps is fine too. right now, the enclosure that I am using has a USB port, and no external power supply, so you must connect it to a computer for it to even power up. Does such an enclosure exist?

Thanks again!
 

cwa107


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Hi, and thanks for reading!

I recently had an idea to keep all of my video files on a separate external hard drive. Now, I wold like to use that same drive as a NAS device. I am going to use itunes to get those files from that drive so that I can use Connect360 to view them on my xbox. I have looked, and looked and I cannot find an enclosure for my 2.5" drive that can get this done for me. I would like to have a gigabit connection, but the 100 mbps is fine too. right now, the enclosure that I am using has a USB port, and no external power supply, so you must connect it to a computer for it to even power up. Does such an enclosure exist?

Thanks again!

I don't know of a NAS enclosure that supports 2.5" drives, but I personally own a D-Link DNS-323 and think it would be perfectly suited to your task. In addition to having Gigabit ethernet support, it can also do RAID1/0 and has a built-in iTunes server. It's a little pricey at about $170, but it's an awesome little server. The pictures e its size too, it's just big enough to contain 2 3.5" drives.
 
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I don't know of a NAS enclosure that supports 2.5" drives, but I personally own a D-Link DNS-323 and think it would be perfectly suited to your task. In addition to having Gigabit ethernet support, it can also do RAID1/0 and has a built-in iTunes server. It's a little pricey at about $170, but it's an awesome little server. The pictures e its size too, it's just big enough to contain 2 3.5" drives.

Thank you very much for the information! You are correct in saying that this would suit my task... because it does perfectly! But the only problem is that it's pricey, and I don't have any spare HDDs laying around, lol. Then what would I do with my poor 2.5" drive?? I saw one that was made my ASUS, but it had it's own antenna and was 802.11g...
 

cwa107


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Thank you very much for the information! You are correct in saying that this would suit my task... because it does perfectly! But the only problem is that it's pricey, and I don't have any spare HDDs laying around, lol. Then what would I do with my poor 2.5" drive?? I saw one that was made my ASUS, but it had it's own antenna and was 802.11g...

Well, you don't have to have both the bays full, BTW... A nice Seagate 250GB SATA drive with a 5-year warranty goes for about $65 shipped these days. So, for less than $250, you have an expandable, power-efficient server with Gigabit Ethernet. Seems like a decent deal to me.

I can't imagine that a G-based Wi-Fi only NAS drive would be fast enough to stream video, but YMMV.
 
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Well, you don't have to have both the bays full, BTW... A nice Seagate 250GB SATA drive with a 5-year warranty goes for about $65 shipped these days. So, for less than $250, you have an expandable, power-efficient server with Gigabit Ethernet. Seems like a decent deal to me.

I can't imagine that a G-based Wi-Fi only NAS drive would be fast enough to stream video, but YMMV.

Yeah, I wasn't so sure about that enclosure either... here is that specific product. I don't think they make it anymore, lol.

So, i was doing more searching, and found that an airport base station may do the trick... what do you think? will the USB work like that?
 

cwa107


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Yeah, I wasn't so sure about that enclosure either... here is that specific product. I don't think they make it anymore, lol.

So, i was doing more searching, and found that an airport base station may do the trick... what do you think? will the USB work like that?

Yep, the Airport Express has a USB port and the capability to share an external USB hard drive through the network. This will compromise performance a bit though - first because of USB (limited to a peak transfer rate of 480Mb/s) and secondly because you won't have the Gigabit ethernet speeds. In addition, you'll need to get an external enclosure for your drive.
 
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Yep, the Airport Express has a USB port and the capability to share an external USB hard drive through the network. This will compromise performance a bit though - first because of USB (limited to a peak transfer rate of 480Mb/s) and secondly because you won't have the Gigabit ethernet speeds. In addition, you'll need to get an external enclosure for your drive.

Great! That's why I asked, because I already have a USB enclosure since I used it as a removable drive to boot into 10.4. Thank you for your help!
 

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