Wireless hard drives, worth it?

[The Snowman]

Looking for a way to stash an external drive somewhere, so I don't have to plug into it when I do backups and store photos. (7+MB per picture is starting to really fill up my 500GB.)

Not thrilled about the price of the Apple Time capsule ($329+). How are the transfer rates on these things?

I'm running a Cisco/Linksys wireless N dual-band router for my home network.

So, what are my options?

[Quigs]

I have a Time Capsule that I use for backups only, and it works great for what it is. That said, I'd never use it for anything other than Time Machine.

I have a Buffalo LS Quad:

Amazon.com: Buffalo Technology LinkStation Quad 2 TB (4 X 500 GB)…

That I use for my media server, pictures and everything else over my home (Wireless-N) network and I am extremely happy with it. I stream video from it for my HTPC setup with no problem, and have no throughput problems at all. Plus, it has native hardware RAID for fault tolerance, which is always nice - especially for things like pictures.

Edit: And it's even nicer since you have a Mac. You can set it up in fstab if you want to go that way and just mount it as a network share, or if you don't, it will automatically pop up in Finder using Appletalk. I actually have two Buffalo NAS's, and am yet to have anything negative to say about them.

[Billy]

Chuck I know you want wireless HD's because you dont want to plug the drive in when you need to do backups but have you considered USB 3.0? It blows even 802.11N (300mb) out of the water. USB 3.0 is spec'd at 4.6GB/s.

[The Snowman]

Chuck I know you want wireless HD's because you dont want to plug the drive in when you need to do backups but have you considered USB 3.0? It blows even 802.11N (300mb) out of the water. USB 3.0 is spec'd at 4.6GB/s.

older MacBook doesn't support it.

[kbroderick]

Does your router have wired Ethernet ports?

I've had pretty good luck with an Iomega IX2-200, but that requires a wired connection (but it could be wired to the router, wireless to the client); I like being able to have it configured for RAID1, so a single hard drive failure won't kill the backup store.

[The Snowman]

Does your router have wired Ethernet ports?

I've had pretty good luck with an Iomega IX2-200, but that requires a wired connection (but it could be wired to the router, wireless to the client); I like being able to have it configured for RAID1, so a single hard drive failure won't kill the backup store.

Yep. I have 2 of 4 ports still open.

[ssg]

I have one of the Netgear units…although I barely use it now, nice unit. Mine was the 1x500gb version that I added a second drive to as a raid setup.

http://www.netgear.com/default.aspx?...adyNASNVX.aspx

[GNTurbo6]

If it's just for occasional use you can get something like a Pogoplug (I've seen them lately for ~$50) and an external USB hard drive. It plugs into your router and you can back stuff up some anywhere on your network.