I want to share my external hard drive over the network

I found a lot of threads and discussions about this, but no answers.
I have a WD My Book External Hard Drive that I'm looking to share over the network. However, when I add the volume to the "Shared Folders" or even a folder within the volume and the "Users:" are grayed out.
When getting info on the volume, Sharing & Permissions says, "You can read and write"
Any ideas?

Hi Keith,
Thanks for your response; however, the first screenshot is through the Sharing settings in the System Preferences.

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Can you share an external hard drive over a network when your Apple Airport Extreme is in bridge mode?

Hello, is it possible to share an external hard drive over a network when I have my Airport Extreme in bridge mode? I can't use my AE as my main router at the moment but still want to be able to use the hard drive on the network, and the router I am using isn't capable of adding an external hard drive. I use Windows 7 and the other router is a Netgear. I have searched the communities and have not come across an answer to this question. I have tried several configurations within windows to try and see the hard drive but none have worked. I can see the hard drive when I run Airport utlities, but it cannot be seen on the network. Thanks to anyone who can help!

I think there is some confusion in this thread..
If you are sharing on a local LAN port forwarding is not required.
is it possible to share an external hard drive over a network when I have my Airport Extreme in bridge mode?
Answer is yes.. no port forwarding, mapping whatever term is used.. is needed. Port mapping is required when you cross over a NAT router.. as long as all the devices are inside a single LAN.. then no port mapping.
I assign to my Airport Extreme, do I do so with the settings of:
Service: SMB
Type: TCP
Server IP: xx.x.x.x
Port Start: 445
Port End: 445
This would not work even from WAN.. SMB is blocked by all responsible ISP.. there is simply too many unprotected windows machines out there. If they allowed SMB .. the world would be flooded with hijacked bots. And stolen data like bank accounts. SMB is not a secure protocol.
But this is not necessary on a LAN.
The problem can be Mavericks which does a terrible job presenting network drives.. The usual recommendations are to use AFP or force the connection to CIFS (ie SMB1 not 2).
If you use airport,, then use AFP.
In finder.. Go, Connect to server.
AFP://AEname or AEIPaddress. (replace with the network name of the AE or its actual IP address).
When asked for password.. type public if you did not change it or use whatever password you put.
Store the password in the keychain.

Can I share my external hard drive over the Airport Extreme via the internet to someone in a different city?

Can I share my external hard drive over the Airport Extreme via the internet to someone in a different city?

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After asking a few individuals at my local Apple Store, I have been consistantly told that I can plug in a usb hard drive into the bottom of my airport express and share it over the network.
However, after making sure my airport express has the latest firmware (6.3) and even donwloading and installing the airport disk utility I still am not having any luck getting my HFS (journaled) usb 2.0 hard drive to be visible on the network.
I have also noticed that when following the instructions on this apple support document (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=AirportUtility/5.1/en/ap2108.html) that when I get to step 3, the option to click disks is grayed out. I assume this supports my theory that the airport express won't share hard drives, can anyone confirm?
Am I doing something wrong? Or were the reps at my store mistaken and the only hardware that can share a hard drive is the airport extreme not express?
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Message was edited by: althe3rd

Thanks for the swift reply.
Continuing my investigation I started to come to the conclusion you just mentioned. I am surprised none of the staff at my store realized this. However, at least I know now.
The basis for me looking to this is... With leopard on the eve of its release, I wanted to get a large network accessible storage solution that would allow my wife's and I's Macbook pros to use time machine on the network drive when we were at home. Since we rarely use our laptops while sitting at a desk connected to an external drive, I figured this would be a great idea and started to look into various NAS solutions.
Surprisingly, most generic (netgear, western digital) network drives require you use proprietary software to connect to them, and are only compatible with windows xp. After seeing the options the airport extreme opens up in terms of network storage I figured it would be the best bet.
Do you have any other suggestions besides getting an airport extreme? I would rather not have to buy a full blown mac that I have to leave on 24/7 to share the drives. Or do you see any possible pitfalls to this idea? Such as, would time machine forget to use the network drive after a while since it wouldn't always be available to it when away from home?

I can't see my external hard drive on the network.

I can't see my external hard drive on the network. I have a WRT160NL router with USB. I plugged the drive in the USB and set up a share in the router config.

Did you map the drive? It won't show up in Explorer automatically like a jump drive or an external drive plugged directly into the PC will.
You didn't mention the OS you're running, but what you want to do is choose "Map a network drive" and you'll see the router listed as a network device. Click on it and you should see the external drive listed. You can map it from there.

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This is our resident iPhoto guru, Terence Devlin's, advice:
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I totally agree. It was frustrating that it would add to the sharing list just like any other folder and say it's shared but then not appear on the network on other computers.
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If you import from iPhoto into Elements Organizer, the files will be copied to your hard disk and all the organization done in iPhoto09 will be carried forward to Organizer catalog. This can be done if you have enough space on your hard disk. However if you want to use Organizer solely + not create duplicate copies of your images, you can import photos directly from the Hard Disk. Ensure to write all metadata to files within iPhoto so that when the same photos are imported into Organizer, the tagging done is brought along.
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iTunes: Back up your iTunes library by copying to an external hard drive
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1751
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https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3744259
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I want to share my external hard drive over the network

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