Wireless HD help

I am looking for a good wireless hard drive that hooks up to my router . It's my goal to use the router as a server for my iPad and android tablet for streaming my media files . I have tried 2 different wireless HD's from goflex but found them to be less then stellar . In fact , the one from goflex , titled goflex home , slowed my router right down and made it extremely difficult to even browse the Internet from my portable devices .

Does anyone out there know a good external wireless HD that can connect to my router to act as a server for my computer , iPad and android tablet ?

Or am I going about this wrong, is there a better option to create a wireless home network server ?

Thanks for any help

reply to post by Max_TO

I've never heard of a wireless hd but I daresay they exist. I would advise you to look more at something called a media tank. It's basically a mini PC with onboard HD and can do all of what you need and more and the hd is replaceable. Popcorn Hour looks quite promising but will set you back a coupla hundred dollars. This is the latest version of it.

Popcorn Hour

reply to post by LightSpeedDriver


Ok, that looks pretty frigin cool !

Definitely looks like an option

reply to post by Max_TO

Had to almost kick myself. Wireless hd's do exist, they are called NAS's. I'm getting forgetful. They can get as fancy as you want to pay for, upwards of a thousand dollars when filled with hd's. Media tank's are more a one size does all device. You can plug it in to stereo installations and tv's and watch movies, stream music via wifi, etc. NAS's are more designed for file sharing with maybe a bit torrent client built in. Both can cost serious dollars though, depending on capabilities.

ETA QNAP make some NAS's, www.qnap.com... Just to be fair in the name of advertising. Must name at least one competitor.

reply to post by LightSpeedDriver


Well I just tried two nas wireless HD's today from goflex and I can't say I am to happy with the product they have put out on the market

NAS is the option if you wanna go that path, make sure you plug ethernet from nas to the router and then use the router as the wireless share. Also some nas are pretty crap so lookup some reviews first. I hear the seagate ones were pretty good and the dlink ones too.

Alternatively, just dump some huge hard drives into your pc and share out the folders using windows, that's what i currently do and can access everything on from pc from within my internal network. And with additional software you can then share it out over the internet and pick it up from anywhere you can get an internet connetion. Much cheaper to as you only have to buy the hard drives.

reply to post by Max_TO

As the poster above me notes, some of them can be quite slow. Plugging it in directly to your home router possibly gives it more room to work with and make it feel more responsive. I can't offer much help with brands but even with the same brand some models are better than others. One good thing about NAS's though is power usage. It's not a 300 watt pc you are running, just a hd and a small embedded system. More like running a laptop as far as power is concerned.

reply to post by Max_TO


There are many media systems available, but it really depends on your needs. One of the best ones I've seen is Boxee.

One of the good features with it is that the remote is radio not infra-red so you can hide the actual box if you like, but I doubt you'd want to cause it's soooo pretty!




It has a built in browser as well so you can use your TV as internet TV if you haven't already got one.



And it has decent conectivity to iOS





www.dlink.com...

ETA

Boxee organises all of your media for you. Say for example you have a movie, it will download the cover and description for that movie and put it all together to make it look neat. Also, you can stream things from online such as YouTube. I had a little play around with it and it seemed to work great. You can download apps too which makes it more fun to play with. The netflix app allows you to rent movies, but you don't necessarily have to as you have an internet browser there.

reply to post by scottlpool2003


Will boxee stream to an iPad and android devices?


Also , is it commen for an NAS to slow down ones router to the point that it makes browsing very very slow , even when not transferring files to the NAS?

reply to post by Max_TO


Yeah it will stream to the pad, not so sure about the pod/phone though but you can use the pod/phone as a remote to the t.v.

Are you looking to stream to different locations or just the house? If you're looking to stream to different locations I'm not so sure that boxee would work, best looking into it.

I think that when streaming over your current set up it would slow your network down as it's using bandwidth. Depending on your internet speed you'll encounter this problem with most set ups. I know with boxee, my friend had 2mb internet and it seemed to run fine. The documentaries (mainly around 1 hour long) streamed straight away, but things like movies needed a little time to buffer (as with most streams) but as I say, this was streaming online. If you were streaming your own media that was stored on the device it would run a lot quicker.

Boxee has a few different methods too such as connecting to a remote device (PC, Mac, iPad etc), USB (which should, but don't quote me on it, enable you to plug in an external HD as well as the built in HD) and memory card.

If you click the link in my last post and scroll down, there are a few other things you can purchase for it such as a dedicated router, online storage at 1tb.

I'd definitely look into dedicated media centres though, they'd in my opinion put less of a strain on your network.

reply to post by scottlpool2003


Thanks for the info

Basically i want mass storage that I can stream to my computer , iPad and android tablet . I tried out the sea gate goflex home but discovered that 1) it won't stream any video to an android device and 2) just by having the segate goflex plugged into my router it slowed down my router to the point I couldn't even browse the net from my tablets

And yes , I do have high speed Internet

I have a similar setup. I was tired of documents here, media there, just too messy. Bought a 4 bay NAS as others have suggested, set-up with RAID 5. That gives me about 6TB usable of the 4x2TB's I have installed. The NAS is completely web managed. Within the NAS I setup NFS to stream all my movies to my media center a WDTV. The WDTV are made by Western Digital I think and retail for about $100. The WDTV can also use custom software.

What I like about WDTV is that I am not limited to an attached hard-drive, my NAS determines that.

I now stream content to my WDTV for main viewing, and also to my netbooks and tablets for other items. It's great having everything in 1 spot.

WDTV

There are always cheaper alternatives but this was priced within my budget and has far exceeded my expectations.

brill

Brought my Seagate flexgo back and picked up a NASHVILLE with DLNA.

Popping some files on it now and will report back, crosses my fingers

After playing with it for a few days now, I must say that I am pretty pleased with my WD DLNA HD.

It streams to my idevices, android tablet and my tv/bluray player.

If you are looking for such a device to handle your media, check it out. I would be interested to hear how WD2go works out for you

Edit to add.. I have A my book live by WD 3tb with DLNA.

My auto key pad on my tablet total mucked my post above this one