Wireless Hard Drive

Gone are the days of measuring external hard drive capacity with gigabytes (GB).  Or at least the days are seemingly numbered.  With today's external disc drives measuring 1 terabyte (TB) and more you can see why.  A terabyte is about 1,000 gigabytes (1,024 to be exact) and renders many of your storage issues moot.  To put into perspective how much memory 1 TB of disk drive capacity is, let's compare how many common household computer files it will hold.  Nearly every person in the USA has a digital camera these days.  And since the price has come down so precipitously, a 10 megapixel camera is pretty standard fare these days.  When taking pictures with a 10 megapixel camera each picture requires about 4 MB of memory.  If you were to fill up a 1TB wireless hard drive with only pictures from your 10 megapixel camera you would need to 250,000 pictures.  That is a lot of snapping and downloading!  Suffice it to say, unless you are a professional photographer you are not likely to have anywhere near this many photos (and yes I am including you new parents that take outrageously too many pictures of their kids and newborns much like I did when they were young).

How about another common household file, the mp3 or similar music file.  In general these files take up a similar space as a 10 megapixel picture, maybe slightly less.  If we can assume a song will take up approximately 3 GB that would equate to about 333,000 songs.  I know that most people have impressive CD/music collections, but it likely will not compare to those number of songs!

But really where the 1TB wireless hard drive comes in handy is with movies.  It is becoming increasingly common for people to digitize their DVDs, BlueRays and the like to their hard drives.  Given the exploding capacity hunger that these file types require, it really becomes clear why the move to terrabyte is so pronounced.  The average DVD is about 8 GB in size, and therefore you can store about 128 DVD to your 1 TB hard drive.  That is a lot of DVDs, but I know lots of people that have plenty more than that.  However, when looking at BluRay discs, the story changes entirely.  A 1 terrabyte drive only hold approximately 20 BluRay movies.  That is a surprisingly low number.  If you own a BluRay player, odds are you had that many discs in only the first 2 months, let alone the next year and so on.

1 TB sounds like an astronomical number until you consider the voracious appetite of today's file types and then it becomes clear why a move to a 1TB wireless hard drive is a good move for the technologically savvy consumer.

One great way to create a wireless hard drive system is to buy a wireless router that also doubles as a hard drive storage solution.  Enter the Linksys wireless hard drive.  This unit is a wireless router with a key attribute that allows for this to be a great wireless solution for your external data storage needs.  It has a USB port that allow you to connect whatever you would like to your wireless router and have it available to whatever can connect wirelessly.  Nearly all external hdd's come equipped with a usb cord that will connect the hard drive to a usb port.  Usuaully this is how the portable drives are connected to computers for  backup storage.  Lord knows this is the way that I have always used external storage to backup my files.  The problem with this is that you need to dig out your external disk drive, plug it in to the outlet and then connect to your computer.  This doesn't seem like a hassle the first few times, but I'm always way delinquent on ensuring that my files are backed up.

Linksys Wireless Router That Doubles As A Wireless Hard Drive

When it comes to finding a wireless router that will also double as a wireless hdd it is sometimes hard to know which exact model is the one that you want.  When it comes to Linksys, this is the WRT610N Linksys wireless hard drive. In addition to having a capable USB port to connect your external hdd to, the unit comes with the superior wireless N technology which is the top of the line wireless system that is the fastest on the market today.  You can find these many places, but often going to Ebay rewards one with a great deal on this unit.
This, of course, is the beauty of the wireless hdd in general.  If you can connect wirelessly to your external storage, you can not worry about digging it out of the closet and doing all the stuff it takes to perform your backup.  Just connect to your Linksys wireless router and your storage is ready to rock already.  Heck, if you want something extremely portable go with a usb thumb drive or similar.  If your drive(s) and router are constantly up and ready you no longer have a large task ahead of you.  Of course on this site I focus on wireless drives, but you can add any number of other usb ready devices such as iPods (here's a cool tip on how to move your iTunes library to your wireless hard drive), mp3 players, and so forth.

So there you have it, a wireless hard drive using a Linksys router.  The beauty of course being that you can use a great router that Linksys is known for and yet still keep your choice of what type of disk drive you want to use as your data storage vehicle.  In terms of flexibility, the Linksys wireless hard drive likely is the best in class.