"Martin Brown" wrote in message
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On 20/07/2020 18:52, Graeme wrote:
My router, supplied by Zen, is a Fritzbox 7530 and, looking at the
manual, appears to be capable of more than I use it for, which is just as
a router.

For example, I can apparently connect an external hard drive to the
router by USB, said drive then being visible and usable by anyone on our
home network. That we be great for sharing the countless films, photos,
mp3s etc. we have accumulated.

Q1 Has anyone actually done this, and does it work well?

Before you go too far test it out with a USB memory stick. And think
carefully about the potential gotchas if the mains goes down abruptly.

If you really want something reliable then a RAID array fileserver is a
much better option. If you want something cheap and cheerful then there
are plenty of USB sticks to choose from up to at least 256GB.

q2 Recommended drive? Thinking 1 or perhaps 2TB. Any names to go for,
or avoid? WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Verbatim etc.

I would buy a Samsung solid state drive rather than spinning rust. YMMV

I still have a large spinning rust drive in my main PC but everything that
matters now is on the much faster Samsung SSD.

But does speed really matter with a file server which for most
of us would mostly have media files on it which are used at the
media play speed anyway.