How to Create a Shared Drive on a Home Network

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jason, Mac genius. And today, we're going to look at hooking up a shared drive to our system, to our network. So we have right here our wireless router. So, our MacBook is again connected. This goes right to our wireless router. This is the power switch (unplugs). And then we have a network drive here and this is how you hook up the network drive. It's got an ethernet port on it. Most drives just have FireWire USB, but this has got an ethernet port on it, which makes it a network drive. So, we've got that directly hooked directly into the router as well, right here (shows plug). And most network drives have a utility that you have to use, software wise, that directs, that mounts and unmounts the drives and things like that. And so this particular drive uses NDAS Utility. So, I'm going to select NDAS Utility and I'm going to choose mount with read/write. And we should see that. There it is! Mounted on the desktop. And at this point, we've got access to read and write this drive. Just to make sure that this is a shared drive, though, I'm going to open -- again, just to make sure this is a shared drive, I'm going to get info on the drive and go down into sharing and permissions. And we want to change the permissions from everyone to read only to read and write. So, I'm going to type in my admin password and change this to "Read & Write". And now that's technically a shared drive so other systems can network this. And then getting rid of this, also again, you want to use the same software utility. This is called the NDAS Utility up here. And we are going to unmount the drive. I'm going to take our FireWire drive here, just an external FireWire powered bus paneled drive and I'm going to hook that right into the FireWire port on the computer. And again, everyone is set to read only. We're going to click on the lock there, put in our admin password and then change the everyone to "Read & Write". And now that is basically a network drive, so anyone who has access to this computer is also going to have access to that drive. And that is basically how you set up a shared drive on your Mac. I'm Jason. Thanks for watching."