Read/Write to an Ex-HDD over WIFI

[thorsonb]

How can I / is it possible to write (copy files from A to B) to an external HDD over Wifi?

I live in a house with 12 people, and we all use the Wifi.

I own 3 different laptops (Macbook OSX 10.5, Laptop Windows 7, Netbook Win XP Pro)

I own one ex-HDD, which houses all my music/videos/documents.


What I want to do is be the only one on the wifi network that can see the ex-HDD when it is plugged in to any of my computers, and copy / paste files to it.

Basically I want my ex-HDD, when plugged in, to be like my file server, an only I should be able to see it (because I'm sure setting need to be set to share the HDD or something)

Remember I own 3 different OS's Mac OSX, Win7 and WinXP Pro.
Thus meaning from any of the 3 OS's I have, I have full access to the files (delet, copy, read/write etc... etc)


Any help is always appreciated.

Pardon me in advance if I misunderstand your tips/help/comments, I'm not that tech literate .

 

[root]

you need a disk either attached to a single machine and shared over wifi.

or a disk caddy that allows either sharing over wifi,
or sharing over network, (and you'll have to plug it into the network ports on your router to make it accessible).

the second option is probably the best option as then your disk has faster speeds going to the router, (100 rather than 54Mb).

the disks generally use a hardware embedded version of Samba,

so you can access on windows just typing \\(name or address)\share
and you can access on mac typing smb://name/address/share

 

[jmacavali]

^Agreed. You need to either plug it into one of the laptops and share it (making sure to set the proper restrictions) or get a caddy that has network access.

Let us know which you'd prefer and we can give more details about that one.

 

[anonymust]

good queston. i got a macbook and a windows desktop also

 

[JCB1]

I think a good idea is to buy the cheapest laptop on ebay you can find and share the external hard-disk from this laptop