External USB 3.0 drive, can you attach a USB to Ethernet adapter?

[JohnStewart]

A friend of mine has been working from home for the past few months. He has an external USB drive that holds music, photos, backups of documents etc. however, his wife also works from home in a separate room, and previously had exclusive use of the drive during the day and there have been times when both wanted to use the drive at the same time.

I suggested one could attach the drive to their laptop and make it shareable, but this isn’t ideal as it needs the laptop to be permanently on. Attaching to their Wi-Fi router isn’t ideal either as it sits above a kitchen unit to get a decent signal throughout their house for tablets and phones. They use a telephone extension in the kitchen to connect instead of the master socket in the lounge.

He spotted USB to Ethernet adaptors on a website and asked if he plugged this into the USB port of the drive, it would make it accessible to both if plugged into a network port as their house has a single port in most rooms installed by the previous owner with a gigabit switch in the hall cupboard. I said I didn’t think it would work, as you couldn’t install a device driver for the adapter.

I know a NAS would be the ideal solution, but the cost outweighs the benefit for what is likely to be a few months use at most.

Any (low cost) suggestions?

 

[JohnStewart]

Huge thanks for all the suggestions Looked at the Silex device which looks like it would fit the bill, but a little on the pricy side for what "hopefully" is just a few months use.
As Mcnumpty suggested it would be cheaper to buy a second drive and they can have one each

Also looking at Raspberry Pi options, as that's something I didn't think about.

The issue with the kitchen placement of their existing router is that there's only a double socket socket underneath the wall unit it sits on top of. The power and phone cables are taped together and run through a small hole drilled in the base and top, and the kettle or toaster (can't remember which) is plugged into the other mains socket. Adapters and extentions are a possibilty but it would be a bit more messy/fiddly when he was looking for a simple £12 plug and play option.

 

[JohnStewart]

All depends how much data we are talking about
But if it's just stuff for work
Surely it's not a massive amount?
Just Under 10 quid for a 32 GB 100MBs read and write
Flash drive
Or 13 quid for 64gb
20 quid for 128gb
Or just copy the usb to the laptop?
In a folder or even make a separate partition for it

I believe there's several Tb of data on the drive, which is too big for them to store on either laptop. How much of that is music, photos and videos and how much of it is work data I'm not sure.

I pointed him to the Raspberry PI and got a reply along the lines of WTF

So far, I think his preferred option is to look for a second hand range extender for the wifi, and move the router to the master socket and plug it into there - so many thanks for that suggestion

 

[JohnStewart]

I have the odd range-extender or two sitting idle. Put something in the wanted section and we can chat.

Many thanks for the offer, but I don't have enough posts yet to see the marketplace area of the forum. I believe my friend has got one sorted now via FB marketplace

I hope they have that backed up - sounds to me like they need to invest in a NAS which can do real-time replication tpre-COVID normal status.o an external drive and/or regular static copies.

It is their backup drive I believe they copy the "latest" version of a file onto their laptops from the external drive, and then save it back to the drive when finished. I'm from the "you can never have too many backups" camp myself, and will try to get them sorted out with at least a cloud backup once we are back to pre-COVID normal status.