Looking for a wireless USB hub

[dafoe]

I have aprox. a dozen 2TB and 3TB USB hard drives filled with various types of content. I am sick of all the wires and I am sick of constantly having to swap hard drives in and out to find what I'm looking for.

So I decided to find a wireless USB hub with security. Something I could throw in the closet and have all my hard drives connected to at once so that I could access them wirelessly through my PC and other wireless devices.

The problem is, I can't find anything like that. The only thing I can find is USB 2.0 and only has 4 ports. I want at least 7 or 8 ports. And I want to have security.

Am I looking for something that doesn't exist? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[pandy]

NAS + WiFi

[wrathofbod]

if you dont want nas or wifi, this runs on esata/ usb Or usb3
holds 4 drives hot swap & will suport upto 3tb per bay
you would have to open up/strip down all your enclosure drives cases .
For £90 its not bad
http://www.storagedepot.co.uk/hornettek-enterprise-4x-quad-bay-jbod-disk-enclsure.html...ign=googlebase

[pandy]

with one point - if those HDD are equipped in interface like SATA - many USB HDD's doesn't use SATA to USB translation and they have native USB interface on board.... ten such bay simply will not work...

[dafoe]

Thanks for the advice guys.

I looked into NAS and I was getting $150 to $500. And this was for 4 bays! Plus I would still like to connect the hard drives directly to my PC from time to time- so that would be a pain.

The only other thing I can think of is using my old P4 backup PC. Getting some USB hubs to connect all of them, adding a wireless card to the PC and adding it to my home network. I do hate the idea of running another PC 24/7 My electric bill is already through the roof.

And having external hard drives on 24/7 is probably a bad idea too. It seems they would be prone to overheating.

Maybe this is just a stupid idea. Maybe I just need to deal with the situation. It seems like one of those issues that has no practical cost effective solution.

Again, thanks for the replies guys.

[pandy]

FreeNAS www.freenas.org + some low energy PC (VIA EPIA?) - saved money dedicate to electricity bills

[jman98]

Maybe this is just a stupid idea. Maybe I just need to deal with the situation. It seems like one of those issues that has no practical cost effective solution.

I'm not saying it's stupid, but maybe you do just need to deal with it. I've got an old first gen Western Digital media player and it's still useful to me, but here's my work process.
1) Attach USB flash drive to PC.
2) Copy files using PC to flash drive.
3) Eject flash drive.
4) Put flash drive on WD.

It can take up to 10 minutes for extremely large files to be copied (I'm talking 10+ GB here). It's just how it is. I can live with it. I get the convenience part of what you want to do, but do you REALLY need to have all those drives connected? How many times do you re-watch stuff anyway? I've got a lot of movies that if I'm being honest with myself I would have to admit that I'm not likely to ever watch them again. You may need to just start keeping an index of your files on the drives so you know what you have and where it is located so you can efficiently just attach the drives you need when you need them. If nothing else, start such a list now and every time you get a new video, add it to the list.

[hello_hello]

My solution is to use internal drives as external drives and connect them to a PC using a hard drive dock. USB3 preferably. Something like this: http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/02/500x_watersheddock.jpg
Of course you still have to swap hard drives if you have a lot of them, but at least there's only a need for one dock per PC so it eliminates all that swapping of power supplies and cables. I have a dock permanently connected to each PC and one permanently connected to my Bluray player, and a spare dock so I can take a drive with me without needing to disconnect the dock attached to one of the PCs.
To supplement that, both PCs have a SATA data and power lead hanging out of the rear of the case so I can connected a hard drive directly that way if need be, although you could probably add an eSATA bracket to the rear of the PC if you like "neat" and use an eSATA to SATA cable.

Of course if you have a bunch of external USB drives that's probably not much help unless you're happy to pull them apart and remove the drives, but it might be something to consider in the future. You can't beat connecting a drive directly to a PC via USB3 or SATA for speed.