Hooking up a external USB hard drive to a wireless router?

[Imola Ghost]

Alright I've been wanting the 2TB Time Machine but it being pretty damn expensive and me not needing the router along with it only have 3 ports on the back has kept me from purchasing.

I began looking at my Linksys WRT-610N wireless router and it has a USB port on the back of it. I began reading and looking around in the setup of this feature but HAVE NO CLUE what to do and what I can do with it.

I've got a USB hard drive plugged in it for testing purposes. Can someone please help me figure this out? In the setup of the router you select "STORAGE" which allows you to either have the external USB hard drive as a "DISK" a, "MEDIA SERVER" or a "FTP" server. I'm not sure what all settings I need to select.

I'd like to use the hard drive as a Time Machine-like hard drive. I want to put all of my photos, music and files on it and be able to access it like a hard drive that was connected directly to my computer [if possible].

I have very little to none experience with this type of set up.

 

[waw74]

disk - shows up as a drive plugged into another computer on your network. Uses the windows version of file sharing, but macs can see this. this is what you want.

media server - shows up to devices that can handle it. if you have a PS3, it should find it

FTP, another method of accessing files, but probably not what you want.

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I can't find anything about what drive formats that it supports, but chances are that the default mac format is not supported, and you'll have to reformat to use it with the router, just be aware, this will erase all of your data on the disk.
if it's a new disk with no data on it, just format from the menu on the control page for the router. or if the drive is formated for windows, it should work too.

 

[Imola Ghost]

The drive is already formatted as FAT and I can see it only in the Linksys setup but I do not know how to access it directly from my 27" iMac. I've looked in a Finder window and only see my MacIntosh HD, my Mobile Me iDisk and another external USB hard drive I have connected directly to my 27" iMac.