Networking – How to access the external hard drive wirelessly from the laptop

external hard drivelaptopwireless-networking

My desktop crashed so I am migrated over to a laptop. I have wireless in my home so I am trying to be able to use to laptop in any room without any other connections (wireless printer, wireless mouse, etc)

The one issue I have is that my desktop had 2 external hard drives (USB) connected to them and I am trying to figure out the best way to treat these as external drives without having to plug them into the laptop directly.

My external hard drive is the Western Digital WDH1U5000N 500GB and my laptop is a Dell D620.

Best Answer

You should be able to use a NAS (Network Attached Storage) adapter to connect your USB drives to your router. This would make them part of your network, so that you can get to them from any device connected to the network (wired or wireless). Here is an example of a NAS adapter:

http://www.addonics.com/products/nasu2.php

Related Solutions

Windows – Cannot copy files from external hard drive to desktop hard drive in Window 7

This may be better treated as a comment, but too much detail for a comment.

A suggestion is to use Robocopy

Open Notepad and type the following, editing the source and destination path with your source and destination (please note)

robocopy "sourceFolder" "destinationFolder"

if you want to copy all the subfolders then use the /E like:

robocopy "sourceFolder" "destinationFolder" /E

Save the file as copy.bat and then run the script (double click it to run).

Let me know if you get the issue still.

Windows – use two external hard drive as one

If your data is important, you don't want to be doing anything "non-standard".

I would say you have two safe solutions that come to mind:

Buy a larger external drive.
Buy an enclosure that supports multiple drives and configurations and install the drives in that. You may need to buy a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter. And depending on the enclosure purchased, the drives may be seen as a single drive by the operating system or separate drives using a single connection.

Note, it's quite possible any "dual" drive solution will likely require separate power whereas a single laptop hard drive connected externally can have power supplied by the computer's USB port.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – Cannot copy files from external hard drive to desktop hard drive in Window 7

Windows – use two external hard drive as one

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