Sharing disks over a network for Macs; access over the Internet?

contraband

So, I use a MacBook, and Apple charges $an arm and a leg for their primary router, the AirPort Extreme. It has one great function I'm looking for, and one bonus: it comes with USB ports, and if you plug a hard drive into it, it becomes available as a wireless drive to anyone connected to the network. As an added bonus, you can configure the router to make the drive available from over the internet, so you can log into the drive from anywhere, which is awesome. But, in typical Apple fashion, that requires a MobileMe account, which run $99/year.I'm not looking to shell out that kind of money though.... Surely, another company could make a router with similar functionality for less?

Could anyone recommend a third-party router I could use that would allow me to easily share an external USB hard disk over my wireless network? (If I could wrangle it to connect over the Internet, that would be great too! But not necessary.) Thank you.

Captain Vash

Any D-Link with their "share port" is capable of the NAS you're interested in.

Nerissa

Captain Vash wrote: »

Any D-Link with their "share port" is capable of the NAS you're interested in.

Many / most of the LinkSys wireless routers too, although we've been recently having issues with ours (connection was getting flaky, we got a new router and it was worse, so I'm thinking it's the drive going bad not a problem with the router)

Monolithic_Dome

Depending on how much you need to share over the internet, you could use dropbox for free for that. Anything you put into the dropbox (up to 2gb for free accounts) is available over the web either just for you, or in the "public" folder for everybody.

(yes, that's a referral link. If you sign up I get a little extra space in my dropbox )

Wulf

Personally, I was looking to see how to Shark a disk, but I guess I'm in the wrong place :P That being said, one way of deferring the cost of an Apple Airport is to buy a used one from eBay or some-such place.
Also .Me isn't really a bad service, for less than $10 a month you get secure, ad-free email with the ability to create temporary/permanent aliases on the fly. A huge online archive that you can share or store files with. Web-space to create photo albums, blogs and other such things. Tracking/ information destruction remotely for your iPhone (if you have one), and other things that I and my company take for granted at this point.