Network hard drives

[MCreel]

I'm just wondering how the sharing of a network hard drive works.

Can you use ANY external drive or does it have to be specifically built to be a network drive? How are the connections laid out?

 

[wheelema]

There are HDD that are 'network attached', but not, strickly speaking, network drives. Generally, a network drive requires a network operating system (NOS) to be accessed, but network attached storage (NAS) simply connects to your PC through a switch and can be accessed by any PC with access to that switch.

This is an example from Adaptec.

Any (contemporary) HDD can be used as a network drive whether it goes into a file server or NAS.