As the title says.

Cheers campbell

Apple TimeMachine integrated drive and wifi router works well (now, the original ones had issues) but they are £250 and I assume you want this for Windows. To be honest with external USB drives at £50 for 1tb I just got one of those (Samsung). If you have a new machine with USB3 an external drive is as fast as an internal one.

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/external-hard-drives/home-entertainment/media-sharing-devices/seagate-central/?sku=STCG4000200
Picked up one of these 6 months ago. easy to setup, simple to use. Running all my media around the house and backups. The advantage over a plug in drive is the backups work regardless so long as your on the network.

Its for a mixture of devices, Ipad, macbook, windows laptop, possibly phones etc.

I’ve got a WD mybooklive. Best described as cheap and adequate. It happily talks to the TV, our phones and all our PCs (the wife’s work laptop won’t always connect). Not the cleverest but it does the job. Not sure about Apple stuff but it says it is compatible and there in an iPhone app

I’ve also got a 2tb WD my book live. It works well for me, like all good kit it just works.

It connects to my MacBook Pro, two iPads, three iPhones, my xbox360 and allows remote access to media when I’m away from home. I use apple time machine to automatically back up to it and have had no issues with it.

The apps to access pics and media work pretty well in my experience.

It does occasionally lose connectivity, three / four times a year, but rebooting it sorts that.

I’d highly recommend it.

@mike’s link looks good although whether you need the larger 4tb model you have to decide at £170. As an aside Apple (and I assume windows ?) can access any drive on the wifi network, so my iPad and iPhone Apple TV can see all the music, films EC on my Mac (now with internal 750gb HDD which cost £60) without any special hardware via iTunes HomeSharing. I can also if I wish setup the drive (all of it or just sections) to be visible to any Apple computer on the network, all this is zero extra cost although clearly you pay a bit more for Apple upfront

jambalaya I assume your talking about sharing something on your mac with the network? That’s just normal networking but the big downside is the computer needs to be on all the time.

Synology Diskstation. They work very well.

@mike yes, just file / drive sharing. Keeping the mac on isn’t an issue in my experience, it’s a Mini so quite well suited to that. I only mentioned it as a comparison. A wireless hard drive has to be on in the same way.