u/snarky_one

Hoping someone has some advice for me, as I've looked around the web and on Reddit, but nothing has worked for me so far.

I bought an 8TB USB hard drive (not SSD) to use as a network drive to plug into my router. The drive has its own power cable.

I found an article that said formatting to ExFat should work fine, so I did that and it would not show up in Readyshare. After research, I found that Readyshare doesn't recognize drives over 2TB. Well, that kind of defeats the purpose of this drive, but I partitioned it into 4 2TB partitions. Still wouldn't read them. After more research I found something that said the drive needs to be formatted as NTFS. I have an old iMac that I installed Windows 10 bootcamp on and used that to format the drive for NTFS. It still would not show up in the Readyshare panel of my Netgear admin. Additionally, I cannot use NTFS, as I want to be able to both read and write from my Mac, which was not possible when I plugged it into my Mac. It became read-only.

Ultimately, I want to use this for backups, but I also want to store movies I rip from my DVDs and play them through my AppleTV. So far, I have not been able to get the drive to show up for Readyshare at all.

Does anyone know of a step-by-step guide to get this type of setup to work?

My Netgear router's firmware is V1.2.10.56. I've rebooted it several times and reformatted this drive several times.

Also, I'm not sure why these limitations of plugging a USB device into the router are in place? Why isn't it able to read something over 2TB?

Thanks in advance.

So I just noticed Apple's Network app is gone from the Applications/Utilities folder. Anyone know why they removed it and what is a good free app to replace it with? I liked the way it was laid out and ease of use and don't want to use the Terminal for things that the Network app did very easily.