Portable Hard Disk Drive with DLNA/UPNP

Western Digital make standalone network drives. They used to be called "MyBook Live" but I believe they've been superceded by their "My Cloud" series. Their 2TB version comes in at about £100 on Amazon. The MBL units had Twonky UPnP (an old version of it) pre-installed but WD later brought out their own media server software.

Unfortunately, I don't have any experience of the "My Cloud" drives (I only use my old WD MBL drives for backup having bought a QNAP server) but they might be worth investigating further.

As for portability, the network drive will still need to be connected to the network using an ethernet cable and installed using a computer.

The single-drive bay Synology DS115 is pretty inexpensive, and its server is plenty capable - I'd avoid silly cheap if you can; the headaches are not worth the purchase savings.

I use a wdmybooklive here in Rio after a much more expensive qnap nas failed twice! Took a while to settle down but now streams music ok, but gave up trying to get cover art on the naim app for the uniti I use here. apart from cover art certainly been less hassle than the qnap - which always seemed to be working hard even when I expected it to be sleeping. I also use  a wdmycloud drive for backup of hdx and a LaCie nas I use for hires files in the UK and it seems much faster than the mybooklive. Be interesting to try with the uniti when I get home for good in May.

Thanks folks.  The WD My Cloud looks like what I was after at £100 at Amazon.  I'll think about the Synology too - that comes in at just over £140 with a 1TB disk.

Hi Gavin,

Your brother-in-law should consider backing up his music files to a separate drive. The MyCloud has an USB3.0 expansion slot which could be used to attach a USB3 hard drive for backing up his files.

Otherwise it may be worthwhile checking whether his router has a USB connection to allow a backup USB hard dive to be used there.

This is likely the cheapest / simplest answer to the original question. A USB drive connected to a router will offer network accessible storage and most modern routers also offer UPNP / DNLA functionality for media streaming. You and your brother-in-law can try this out for zero cost by putting some songs / movies / photos on a memory key and giving it a whirl. Try files in a variety of formats (WAV, MP3, FLAC; MP4 , MOV, whatever) to determine how the embedded media server on the router works. To get up and running should be trivial (or not possible!) and he can then take a measured approach to a Bigger investment - whether it's to upgrade the memory key to a portable drive, per the original question, or to step into a proper NAS solution. 

Regards, alan 

Thanks, both.  I'll remind him again about the backup necessity.  In a way, this would be an additional backup as all his stuff would also be on his laptop too.

He almost certainly has a BT HomeHub - 3, 4 or 5.  Can this do it?  I'll give it a try with a memory stick.

The BT Homehub does indeed have a usb port on the back of it (checked both my old HH3 and current HH5) but not sure if it has any media server software installed so may be for network file storage only. See link below for more info:

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/ans...of-my-bt-home-hub%3F