Networking HDDs

[ACiB]

Hey all,
I have two Western Digital FW800 and USB external drives. I Daisy Chain them and connect them to my computer for media use (Plex FTW), but now my brother is here and he also uses the drives for file storage and whatnot. It's kinda annoying to be unplugging and plugging all the time, and besides, we can't use the drives at the same time obviously so we are looking for a networking solution.
We don't want to buy new NAS HDDs because we already have these two good ones. We are looking for routers, or any other way to network them, we've browsed around and found some solutions, but they only have USB, and only one port. We wanna network them both, any ideas? Thank you a lot.
The uses would be mainly video streaming for Plex, and the occasional file transfer (if we were to transfer big files though, we'd just connect the drives via fw800 to the mac and done hehe)

Thank you a lot,
Alex.

 

[Tomorrow]

If you're hell-bent on keeping these two drives in use, and they're FW-only, I think you're going to have a hard time finding a solution with a router. My guess is you're going to need to get either a NAS or an actual computer to set up as a server, and connect these drives to that.

 

[ACiB]

The drives have USB as well, but how can I connect both drives when the routers only have one USB port, and I can't daisy chain the drives via USB.

 

[Tomorrow]

The drives have USB as well, but how can I connect both drives when the routers only have one USB port, and I can't daisy chain the drives via USB.

 

[ACiB]

A usb hub? was I that stupid? hahah but won't that make the drives slower over the network? I'll be streaming 1080p video content.

 

[Tomorrow]

won't that make the drives slower over the network? I'll be streaming 1080p video content.

There's a theoretical bottleneck if you're accessing both drives at the same time, but if the drives are USB 2.0 and you have an ethernet connection to your router, you should have pretty good performance.

If your connection to your router is wireless, then that will be your bottleneck, and it'll be noticeable with a single drive, regardless of whether you use a hub.

 

[ACiB]

I see. Yes, ideally it'll be a wireless connection from the macs to the router. Will I sea noticeable performance decrease even if I use N instead of G?

 

[Tomorrow]

I see. Yes, ideally it'll be a wireless connection from the macs to the router. Will I sea noticeable performance decrease even if I use N instead of G?

N would definitely give you an improvement.

I once had my iTunes library on a networked drive over a G network, and access times were atrocious, and video had to stop and buffer every few seconds, depending on the video bitrate.

 

[ACiB]

Ok, thanks a lot. And say, for example, I'm watching a movie that is being streamed over the network from those drives. Someone in the network on another computer starts browsing the internet, won't that make my video stutter? Or the fact that I'm streaming video over the network make the other computers n the network browsing speed really slow? I've seen some dual band routers, are those for that particular application?

 

[Tomorrow]

Video will depend on the bitrate - if you're running a N network I think you'll be fine.

Unless you have someone streaming a movie over the internet and someone else trying to stream a movie over the internal network, I doubt you'd see a problem.