Looking to put all of the family music in one easily accessible location – i.e. on a HD attached to the wireless router…

Are there any particular routes to go? My first thoughts were to connect a traditional spinning external HD, but we do have a SSD that could be used

Would be somewhat excessive to use the SSD for a music library – just no need for the speed in that use-case.

Rachel

Yes – that was my first thoughts…

I’d need to buy a new spinny disk, whereas the SSD is sort of available

it depends on how your going to connect it to the router, does the router have a usb port that allows for storage or you may have to look at getting a network attached storage instead.

Your router will ( at least it really should ) have a USB port for just this sort of thing.

The disk you have will be cheaper than the disk you are going to buy.

Also the power requirements for an SSD should be lower meaning that you can connect an USB enclosure with just the USB cable to the router for both data and power.

1. Ceck the manual for the router on how to connect
2. Buy a USB case for the drive
3. format the drive
4. Happy sharing.

Just be aware that your lovely fast USB3 drive may fudge up your WiFi signal:

http://uk.pcmag.com/networking-reviews-ratings-comparisons/13179/opinion/wireless-witch-the-truth-about-usb-30-and-wi-fi-interference

I’m sure most modern routers have this fixed now but its a problem on my asus rt-n65u router. Decimates the WiFi signal due to the USB and WiFi antenna sharing a GND apparently. 🙁

In case it becomes relevant later ..
I had real issues with a BT hub (probably 4?) allowing a usb drive to be plugged in but access for reading and writing being _really_ slow.

It turned out to be nearly an order of magnitude faster to plug a raspberry pi (loaded with raspbian) into a free router network port and mount the usb drive on that as a backup destination.