Family Storage hub

[Darkwolf441]

As my kids are getting older, and bringing home school work. i was wondering if someone could advice me on how i would go about setting up a HDD storage hub connected to a Asus router so we all can use it for music films and stuff for the kids.
What would i need as a storage device?
And how would i go about connecting it to the router so everyone had access to it. password would be in place of coarse.
With thanks

 

[BigT]

You need something called Network Attached Storage, usually abbreviated to NAS. At the lower end of the market they look like an external USB drive but connect via an Ethernet cable to your router. About £100 is the starting point for something like a 2TB WD MyCloud.

If you’re so minded you can do it cheaper by making it yourself with something like a Raspberry Pi and USB external drive. You basically use a specific Linux distribution to make it a NAS appliance. If you’ve more to spend then Synology and QNAP do great NAS chassis into which you slot regular hard drives to make a NAS appliance.

 

[Snapshot]

There are also software solutions such as NAS4Free that can be used on a spare standard PC.

 

[Dave Burton]

I went through a lot of options with this, and eventually ended up purchasing an Archer VR900 (TP-Link, has 2 USB 3 ports and supports powered hubs), an Anker USB 3.0 hub, 3 usb 3.0 enclosures, and used some 1TB HDD's I had lying round to fulfill a simple NAS solution. I have anywhere access to the drives, the last bit of the puzzle is software to auto backup from 1 drive to the other, but so far the family are very happy they can access media from any PC. It was all also very easy to setup, which was a bonus.

 

[bledd]

Synology NAS.