Possible to turn USB drive into NAS?

I have an external USB harddrive formatted as HFS that I'd like to use it as a network attached storage device from time to time. I'd prefer wired, but wireless could be fine too.

I gather there's a Linksys product and a Dlink product that can do this, but both are reviewed poorly and I can't tell if they support HFS, and I'd rather not reformat the drive. Both are also from 2004, so I'm hoping something may have imporved since then.

Thanks for any help.

Just had a friend asking the same thing. After much research, it seems the NAS drives he looked at do not support HFS nor NTFS. (He wanted NTFS support.)

Unless you have large files (~ 4 GB) you might want to think about re-formatting that USB drive to FAT-32. I know... FAT-32 also wastes cluster space especially on large drives but it is compatible with almost every OS.

Regards.

I had a Seagate Free agent external USB drive that was crashing because the enclosure didn't dissipate heat well. Well I disassembled it and put the SATA drive into a DLink DNS-323 NAS enclosure. Works beautifully now and the ethernet port on the back is gigabit so with an AEBS it's plenty fast.

flowrider's idea is essentially the best, and cheapest, way to go. Just get a NAS enclosure, swap the drive, and you should be set.