Verbatim External Hard Drive NAS guide

If you do not have LAN setup, or you primarily want to provide additional storage to a single computer, then you should consider USB as your interface choice. Please refer to the next section to learn how to install and use your NAS drive using USB.

If your PC is connected to a LAN over Ethernet (either wired or wireless), and you primarily want to provide shared storage amongst two or more computers on the LAN, then you should consider Ethernet as your interface choice. The ﬁgure below provides one example of a LAN conﬁguration.

As a cautionary note, please be aware that data stored through an Ethernet connection is stored in the same FAT32 partition that is accessible through a USB-B connection. This is very convenient if you want to temporarily move your network drive to another PC that is not connected to the LAN and you still want to read data stored on the drive. Since most computers have a USB port available, you can connect your drive using USB-B and have access to your previously stored data.

On the other hand, if you have private information that you have stored using the password protection features within the NAS environment, you may want to take special precautions to protect this data from view during USB-B connection.

For details about user passwords and other network features, please jump ahead to the section entitled Connecting NAS drive Using Ethernet to learn how to install and operate your NAS drive using Ethernet.