Apple TV and Belkin Network USB Hub

[jjfeltham]

Have purchased Apple TV, jailbroken and XBMC installed.

I have most of my movies on a portable hard drive. I managed to find it with the Apple TV when I connected it to my laptop.
To save me always having to have my laptop on I have been looking at NAS drives etc, but I was wondering, could I just purchase the Belkin Network USB Hub, attach that to my router and plug in my portable hard drive to the Belkin.

Then wirelessly find the Portable hard drive through the apple TV and watch my movies that way?

Any help would be most appreciated.
This is the belkin

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Belkin-F5L009uk-Network-USB-Hub/dp/B000WQ9BPM/ref=pd_cp_computers_0

 

[jwm2]

That should work just fine. Just be warned you will be limited by the speed of the usb port when transferring and accessing your data. I bought a mybook live 2tb earlier this week and files transfer to it much quicker than i can transfer files to my external drive connected with fw800 due to the extra bandwidth. I can transfer over several gb of files in minutes over a gigabit ethernet connection. It would take roughly 20-30% longer using fw800 and 70-80% longer using usb 2.0.

Just so you know the mybook live is a has drive with gigabit ethernet and 7200rpm hdd built in.

 

[waw74]

the belkin won't work without a computer being on.
you would have to connect your laptop to the belkin (over your wireless network), then share the drive to the appleTV.

that device shares the USB device back to your computer via a propriatary protocol of some sort, and you have to have a client program on the computer to see it, and since the TV doesn't have a client program it wouldn't work directly.

you need a NAS (network attached storage) device which reads the drive and then shares that by either SMB/CIFS (windows sharing, sometimes you'll see SAMBA) or AFP (mac sharing)
windows can only use smb
macs can use both smb and afp


one example is the Synology DS110j. it is a litte more expensive, but it has an empty hard drive bay, so in the future, you can just buy a bare drive and put it in there if you want to expand your storage. it has 3 USB ports for your external drive.
it will also act as a print server if you wanted to add a printer. also has several other sharing features.

**********
one other thing to keep in mind is drive formats, there are 2 basics used in current OSes.
HFS - standard on Mac. (read/write only Mac)
NTFS - standard in Windows. (read/write windows, read Mac)
--and a couple others--
FAT - old window standard (read/write mac and windows, but max size for each file is about 4GB)
EXT3 (or EXT4) standard in Linux (only mention since it's in the specs for the synology i mentioned)

the read/write info only matters to the computer that the drive is plugged directly into. that computer will then "translate" it to one of the file sharing protocols i mentioned earlier.
(in the case of the belkin, whichever computer is connected to the drive over the network.)

so...
if your drive has been plugged into a mac, the synology probably won't read it. you would have to back up your data, re-format the drive, and then copy everything back to the drive.
if you were plugged into a windows machine, you'll probably be able to connect the drive and be able to read it.

 

[jwm2]

Oh shoot i did not know that. Learn something new everyday

For the cost of that enclosure alone though you can buy a 2tb mybook live which seems to work very well with my macs, pcs and apple tv 2.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1327689571&sr=1-1

 

[waw74]

the synology does offer a couple more features, but if you don't need them, no need to pay for them.

it has a print server.
it's expandable via USB ports. (also configurable with RAID)
bittorrent client

 

[jwm2]

Oh thats cool, had no idea. I heard the mybook have a built in server as well that can be modded to do other things, but i'm not sure at this point what. It works well for what it is and thats a networked storage device to access media across my home network. If i had known it had those capabilities i may have paid the extra money, but having already made my purchase i'm very happy with the direction i chose to go in

 

[LaunchpadBS]

The Belkin USB network hub doesn't work with OSX Lion, beware!

 

[Revelation78]

Oh shoot i did not know that. Learn something new everyday

For the cost of that enclosure alone though you can buy a 2tb mybook live which seems to work very well with my macs, pcs and apple tv 2.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1327689571&sr=1-1

I would step up to the 4TB one and use the second HD as a 1:1 copy for backup purposes. Going that route you can also upgrade the drives yourself later on since they are user serviceable.

I can't tell you how much it sucks to lose GB's of data only to find out your previous backups are hosed too. It's a lesson I learned years ago and now that I have TB's of data I try my best not to repeat my mistakes.