Can you connect an hd directly to a network?

is there a way to hook up a hard drive directly to an airport extreme, or do you have to connect it to a mac and then to the extreme?

I have an extreme as the base station and several airport expresses each connnected to a stereo in different rooms around the house. I want to be able to play music off the big hard drive, controlling it from various laptops carried around the house, and send the tunes to whichever room in the house I want to. Is there any way to do this without having to hook up a mac directly to the extreme/hard drive full of music, acting as a server?

This is all pretty convoluted. Maybe the issue is just this:

Can a hard disk be connected directly to an airport extreme and show up on the network? Or does it have to be connected to a mac, and THEN to the airport?

you could get a network hard drive enclosure and hook it directly up to the extreme i think.

looks like you're looking for something like this:
networked hard drives at bby

Regular external drives are not NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives. NAS drives can connect to a network and have the ability to have an IP address and show up on all of the computers on the network

trpnmonkey41 is correct. I have seen quite a few externals with Network NAS. Iomega makes a couple, LaCie, WD and others. I almost bought one once as here it would be handy sometimes but never did get one. Will in the future.

well i'm glad matt and i were able to answer the question...

Thanks everyone! Much appreciated. Since I already have a 500 gig lacie drive ( non networked) that I put all the music (itunes files) on, someone suggested I get one of these:

""a Network Attached Storage box for about $75 (Coolmax CN-550) that also has a USB 2.0 port"

I'm thinking maybe I could go from my lacie d2 500 gig to the coolmax via usb, and then from the Coolmax to the airport extreme via ethernet. Do you think that would work for what I'm trying to do: get the lacie drive to show up on the network?

thanks!