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JJ15's avatar
JJ15
Aspirant
Oct 16, 2018
Solved

Nighthawk 7800 | Share usb drive on network

Router / Netgear Nighthawk X4S R7800

USB Drive Seagate Expansion portable 1TB

 

Yesterday i attached the seagate usb drive to the router and i wish to share it to all devices on the network, especially to my pc as a media server and for extra storage for photos etc.

The netgear app recognises the harddrive and in windows10 i can also find it under network. But it doesnt really work, i cannot add files or delete files from my windows pc and when i try to play a movie stored on the usb drive it starts downloading it to my local harddrive.

I would like to know how i can make it work better. What i had in mind is that the drive would work the same way as lets say Google drive. I will just see a new drive in the file explorer, can click it, add files, delete files, use it as a plex server etc. So actually i wish my computer would just treat it like it was an internal drive like any other.

 

Any help will be muchly appreciated!

2 Replies

  • The 'solution' you got is possibly wrong. See my screen capture on the right.

     

    It is normal to the Media Server, but you should also see the READYSHARE (default name) as well. That is what you use to access the USB drive.

     

    From a CMD prompt in W10 run NET VIEW:

     

    ==========

    C:\>net view
    Server Name            Remark
    -----------------------------------------
    \\IRV8700              Irv's 8700
    \\READYSHARE           readyshare
    The command completed successfully.

    -----------------------------------------

     

    Then you can use NET VIEW \\READYSHARE (or the name for the share you used) to see what is on the drive:

     

    --------------------

    C:\>net view \\readyshare
    Shared resources at \\readyshare
    readyshare
    Share name       Type  Used as  Comment
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Movies           Disk           read:all-no password;write:all-no password
    USB_2.0_Storage  Disk           read:admin;write:admin
    The command completed successfully.

    ------------------------------------

     

    You can access the shares and see what is on them using DIR:

     

    -----------------------

    C:\>dir \\readyshare\usb_2.0_storage
     Volume in drive \\readyshare\usb_2.0_storage is USB_2.0_Storage
     Volume Serial Number is 6F06-9E72

     Directory of \\readyshare\usb_2.0_storage

    03/16/2018  02:25 PM    <DIR>          $RECYCLE.BIN
    10/09/2018  10:47 AM    <DIR>          .
    01/01/2015  01:00 AM    <DIR>          ..
    12/25/2017  12:10 PM    <DIR>          Acronis Backup
    11/10/2016  08:23 AM         5,453,003 ATI2016_userguide_en-US.pdf
    08/16/2016  05:14 PM        50,449,456 dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe
    05/12/2018  01:39 PM    <DIR>          netgear_downloader
    09/13/2018  02:55 PM                48 New Text Document.txt
    06/13/2018  07:59 PM    <DIR>          Pictures
    05/26/2018  07:28 PM                19 qc
    03/05/2012  06:44 PM         1,644,118 SeagateExpansion.ico
    01/13/2016  10:00 PM           611,096 seatools-for-windows-en-us.pdf
    05/12/2018  11:25 AM    <DIR>          share
    05/12/2018  01:37 PM    <DIR>          System Volume Information
    01/14/2016  11:47 AM    <DIR>          VProRecovery
                   6 File(s)     58,157,740 bytes
                   9 Dir(s)  1,208,285,044,736 bytes free

    ----------------------

     

    However, under Win10, it might not work normally unless you enable SMB1. No need to do a NET USE to attach the drive. Matter of fact you might have problems using NET USE even.