That is definitely an interesting work around......It makes me think of a similar question. Can external drives be attached to the USB port on a Wi-Fi router to accomplish that same purpose? Have you considered contacting support for the brand of drive that you have to ask if this is possible?

 

I have not contacted the drive makers. TechSupport forum seems to be a good source to start asking.
I have about 15 large external drives plus some portables. Some are in mutli-drive "boxes" and some are connected into USB hubs. A few are only connected when needed. I do not want to go to the expense of purchasing an NAS system plus the time involved in setting it up and maintaining it.
A few drives are in a desktop pc which I can access wirelessly, but it has limited capacity. I could put a huge capacity HDD in it but if the basket gets dropped, the eggs will all break.
I have a number of external drives attached to the desktop PC and if (and that is a big if) I could map to the external drives attached to the desktop PC that would help, they are always connected to the desktop PC. The internal drives are always accessible wirelessly.

 

Honestly that set up sounds totally disorganized and disorganization with data is not good. I know you are not wanting to go the route of a NAS but truthfully, honestly and respectfully you need to. The one time expense and effort eliminates all of the mess you have. Once set up then maintenance is minimal. It far outweighs the maintenance of chasing dozens of drives. Centralization = less maintenance

By the way the only reason I asked my initial question was because I thought you were talking about ONLY one drive not this mish-mosh of confusion.

 

As stated, for convenience, you should consider a large NAS server. It can be setup in minutes and requires little maintenance. If you like, you can put new drives into the NAS, copy all of your files onto it, then store the 15 drives on the shelf. So, these "eggs" will not be in the same basket. Of course if these files are critical, consider adding another backup location in addition the the NAS and Externals.

You cannot attach a wireless adapter to the external drive, because the USB port is only for data transfer and does not have an OS on the drive (like a NAS would have) to access the WiFi adapter. You can plug an external drive into the USB port of a Router for a single drive.

Plugging a USB wifi adapter into a physical hard drive

I'm thinking of getting a USB wifi adapter to plug into a desktop PC hard drive (manufactured by Dell) to access my xfinity wifi hot wire. Is it possible to plug such a device into a hard drive? If...

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Any of your drives that are connected internally or externally continuously to a computer can be shared and should be available on your network at any time that computer is up.