Going wireless

[ReenieD]

Hi there

I have a MacBook Pro which is currently physically connected to 2x external hard drives. I'd like to re-arrange my office and have my laptop be more mobile. Is there something I can buy that means I could have my hard drives connected to something that would make them shareable over wifi? I'd like to be able to store them away somewhere with power and run them but such that I can be connected to them via wifi as needed.

I've tried the WD wifi hard drive solution but ended up taking it back as I couldn't get it to work properly (super slow transfer speeds) and wondered if there was anything on the market that I could buy to add to my existing kit?

Thanks

Cat

 

[dangerfish]

Does your router have a USB port?

 

[ReenieD]

Does your router have a USB port?

Yes I think so! It's a BT Homehub 5...

 

[zhenya]

It looks like that device's usb port is USB2 only, so it's going to also be quite slow, but it's worth a shot. A dedicated NAS is likely your best choice if speed is your goal - although ultimately it depends on how good your wireless network is.

 

[jennyp]

Don't forget that the BT Home Hub 5 has a few spare ethernet ports, so you could buy a NAS drive that uses those.

 

[HDFan]

What are you going to be using the hard disks for? Time Machine Backups, Video editing, Word or Excel file editing?
Do you know what kind of bandwidth you are getting via wireless?

Even a very slow USB 2 drive can run at 42.8 MB/s. My old Airport Extreme 802 a/c/n struggled to reach even 20 Mbps when streaming videos. When I upgraded to the AC version speediest results show 71 MB/s or higher. However when I'm streaming Blu-Ray movies at a 30 MB/s rate using AC I still get occasional stutters.

It would take 16+ hours to do an initial Time Machine backup of 1 TB of data at 20 MB/s. Video editing would be almost impossible unless you transferred the files to a local disk.

Your bottleneck is likely going to be the wireless data rate between your computer and the remote hard disk.