Recommend me a wireless router with USB ports

[Falcor]

Need a new wireless router, want it to have USB ports for printer/hard disks

Can some1 recommend me one? (not netgear)

Or alternatively something that i can plug into my router, that i can then connect my printer and hard disk storage to.
(I want to avoid too many power cables etc etc)

 

[Skidilliplop]

You can get USB wifi print servers. they'll work for the printer however i'm not sure if you could upload a Generic USB mass storage driver to it to make the HDDs work. For HDDs you'd probably want a PoE NAS enclosure to avoid power cables. That's not going to be cheap.

A workaround for the USB Hdd would to buy a crappy second hand laptop with a NIC/WIFI and USB2.0 and use that to share the disk on the network. the battery will also double as a sort of UPS should it be disconnected from power which should prevent some annoyance


Tbh if the Printer and HDDs can be in the same place then you'd be better looking at some sort of small barebones box and turn it into a little server.

 

[Falcor]

I was looking at the icybox one on overclockers,

Thinking i could put 2 harddisks in that backing eachother up, attach the printer to it, and directly attach it to the modem, not sure how good it is tho.

There is that many network options available its hard to know which route to go.

Ideally i want something i can leave switched on like a router can, and not worry about power usage and it messing up.

Also in the future im hoping to be using a network media streamer of some sort...not sure which is the best route to go for that combined with the other needs..

 

[wij]

Keep the router and NAS as different devices IMO unless you're going to use something like ClarkConnect/m0n0wall/pfSense running on a server.

Something like the Icybox would probably be ideal, Raid1 drives so your data is backed up across two disks is good. It should also work as a USB print server with most printers and you could use it for streaming media files from around your network.

I would do some research about the read/write speed you can get from the various DIY NAS products you can buy, some of them are not very good performers but I suppose depending on how often you will be trying to move large amounts of data to and from it will obviously be a big factor in whether that is an issue for you.