External Wireless Hard Drive

When people think of wireless hard drives, it isn't completely obvious that an external hard drive might be required.  And to be truthful, you can set up a wireless LAN of sorts that would allow you to connect with a separate desktop computer or similar to access its hard drive.  In essence you would be creating a backup area on your other computer to store files that you have from other devices.  However, this is rarely the case when it comes to people talking about using a wireless hard drive.  In that case, we are talking about having a completely separate or external hard drive that is able to be connected to wirelessly.  To that end a few options are available.

The first is to buy a wireless router that has a special area to place external hard drives into.  A good example of this is a Linksys wireless hard drive enclosure.  This device works like any other wireless router to connect wireless devices to a network.  Where it differs from there is that it has slots specially made to handle hard drives that get connected physically to the router.  These hard drives are then available to whatever device is connected wirelessly to them.  To that end you can transfer files back and forth between your external hard drives and the device you are on.

You can also buy a one stop shop type of wireless hard drive such as the Apple Time Capsule.  The premise behind the time capsule and those drives that closely resemble it is to be a complete enclosure with a wireless router and a hard drive within them.  Basically once you set up the drive to backup your files it does it automatically in the background while you work or over night.  At the beginning it takes some time to configure and then the initial backup can be quite long (over night or perhaps even longer), but once the initial setup is done and the setting are complete it is a hands off, set it and forget it type of deal.  There is a similar type product manufactured by Iomega called the Iomega 1TB Hard Drive StorCenter.  The premise is the same for all of these devices, although some will add functionality to other aspects such as being able to add printers or other peripheral computer devices to the mix.

Of course the one thing you need to remember is to make certain that the device you purchase has the wireless capability that matches your device.  It is important to know if you will be connecting via WiFi Wireless G or WiFi Wireless B/G or Bluetooth or other.  The important thing of course being that your devices matches the wirless type of your external wireless hard drive.