I have a 1TB external USB hard drive with its own power source that I'd like to be able to access via wifi from anywhere in my house. Since my n800 isn't getting much use these days, I thought that it might be interesting to try using it to host the hard drive for that purpose. Is this possible? I'm not even sure if the n800 is capable of hosting shared folders...?

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Interesting idea. A lot of us will soon have spare n8x0 that we are wondering what to do with. Technically the only problem is that the device will be a bottleneck for the disk. When I copy from/to my n810 I only get about 700 kb/s.

c'mon. nobody has any advice for how to do this? that's really disappointing. Have none of you tried to use the n800 this way? surely it's capable.

I'm not talking about massive data transfer here. 700 kb/s would be fine. i'd be satisfied with as slow as 100 kb/s, really, for the convenience of working wirelessly.

Basically, you need an NFS server or a samba server running in your N800.
Of course, you need to make sure that your external drive is detected by the device when connected with a special usb adapter, the USB host app from extra is also needed
And probabaly you need some luck too, some drives may fail to run if they dont use an external power source.

I dont have any experience, but I'm sure you can find an answer if you search correctly the forum. (just step by step)

Good luck

thp has done something along these lines, though he didn't specify how his files were being shared.

ah, thanks to both of you. I guess my search didn't find thp's post for lack of keywords (external+usb+drive+server). his photo shows exactly what i want to do. and i already have easy debian installed and working fine, so i just have to get a file server running, i guess.

dangit. should've tried connecting the drive first. i was pretty sure it was going to work, because it uses an external power source, but alas, it just doesn't get recognized like my thumb drives do. oh, well. so much for that project.

for historical/archival purposes, in case anyone's curious, this is a Seagate 1 TB "Desktop External" hard drive (with external power source) connected via a homemade USB adapter and the USB Control app.

I'm not really sure, but you may need to check what is the file system of the drive.
Maybe you need to create a FAT32 partition, and see if it get detected

I was thinking along the same line. I have yet to meet an external HD w external power that does NOT work with the N8x0. I know this is a big statement from one person . If the HD works, you may want to try this thread #8. It is NOT as stable as SSH though., you need to refresh the drive every now and then.

I am also curious to see about your experience about external HD. My experience is reading is fine, writing is chaotic to unusable.

bun

If your hard drive is formatted in NTFS make sure you have NTFS support on your tablet.