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Question

Recommendation for Wireless External Hard drive

Dec 19, 2014 8:40PM PST

Sorry for the very basic question, but I'm curious to know if there is an external hard drive out there - and most likely there are probably a lot of them - which would allow me to do the following:
- be able to be accessed wirelessly from all devices (we have 2 iPhones, 2 iPads, and 2 Mac laptops) - meaning being able to not only view photos/videos/music using one of our devices, but also be able to dump the same type of media into the drive from one of our devices.
- we also have a wireless sonos sound system that can be accessed from any of our devices - so ideally would love to be able to put our entire music library on the external drive and stream music using any of our devices as the go between.

I would appreciate any and all answers - as well as what would probably be the best out there. I've seen the Seagate Wireless Plus, as well as Apple's Time Capsule - but not sure if they do what I'm looking for.

Thanks!!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Wireless external
Dec 19, 2014 8:53PM PST
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Answer
Typically, what you want is called a NAS
Dec 19, 2014 8:59PM PST
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Just to add.
Dec 19, 2014 9:19PM PST

NAS is short for Network Attached Storage. That's what he wants indeed.

Kees

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Answer
NAS versus Wireless NAS.
Dec 20, 2014 12:45AM PST

Frankly I find most folk hate their Wireless NAS. That's where the HDD is indeed wireless and connects over WiFi to your router and you access it on your WLAN. This is the slowest method due to well, that's all covered in long articles.

Next up are routers that let us attach some USB HDD. This gets us best speed without the speed hit over WiFi and preserves our WiFi speed for that last wireless stretch to our devices. This one is pretty cheap if your router supports it.

Finally there are NAS that connect via Ethernet so those are again saving our WiFi link for our devices. Plenty of choices out there but Wireless NAS? I won't buy them.
Bob

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Answer
Like the other answer the new routers have
Dec 26, 2014 12:43AM PST

a USB connection where you can connect an external drive. You can set security to make it visible and accessible to whoever you want. Another was it to set up a home network and attach the drive to one of the PC (Will have to be o for other PC's to access). Once it's attached to a pc it can be shared. Another option that doesn't involve using a device in you house for storage is cloud storage such as Icloud, Google Drive and One drive.

Sonos speakers can be attached to each other using bluetooth. They can be set up in multi rooms connected to each other via bluetooth and one lead speaker to the media player (Ipod, ipad, laptop, desktop or any device that has bluetooth)