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Looking to share the data from an external Lacie hard drive with both my Windows machine and my Mac machine. The issue here is that I need the drive to be accessed by one of the machine via wireless as the machines are too far apart to use a cable to network them.

The drive is formatted exFAT so both Windows7 & Mac OSX can read from the drive

I have seen some discussion about wireless discussed on Stack Exchange HERE but I don't think this applies to my current situation.

There is also some documentation about using the router see HERE. but the router I am using does not support using the USB port for storage.

How can I network an external hard drive to two machines using wireless?

Kalamalka Kid
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2 Answers2

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The question you have to consider:

  • can I attach the external hard drive to the device?
  • is the device network accessible from both Windows and Mac systems?
  • can the device export the external hard drive's particular file system via the network?

E.g. I might attach an external USB hard disk drive to either my router or my NAS conveniently. Both devices are online all the time, accessible to Windows and MacOS machines in my network and allow to attach a USB device and to export the file system as Samba share or NFS, depending on the filesystem type I put on the drive.

I could also attach to a Windows or Mac, but this might be less convenient, as those machines tend not to be online all the time in my case.

Another option might be using some of those small and cheap Raspberry Pi class Unix or Windows based systems. (Pi example)

Last not least you might have a media player in you network which allows to export an attached external hard drive to your other machines.

mvw
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I was able to network the drive simply plugging in the drive to the WIndows machine, and then using Windows File Sharing on the Windows machine. enter image description here

After this the drive shows up in the Finder window on the MAC:

enter image description here

I then needed to enter the user name from the windows machine on the Mac. It should be noted that there are potential security risks with this method as described HERE

Kalamalka Kid
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