Engadget Guide Touts Old USB Drives as Home NAS, File Server and Login Key

The guide, headlined "More than Just Storage: 8 Ways To Repurpose Your Old USB Flash Drive," argues that the drives most people have left in desk drawers can save money and add a measure of privacy. It notes that thumb drives were once a leap over floppy disks for moving school and work files, growing from 1GB to 4GB to 10GB until they rivaled external hard drives, before cheap, effectively unlimited cloud uploads made them largely redundant.

The first project turns a spare external drive into network-attached storage. Readers plug the drive into the USB port on their router, open the router's settings in a browser and confirm file sharing is switched on. The drive then appears on local devices like any other network volume, letting a household share photos, recipes, documents, books or video without a cloud service. Engadget notes the arrangement is confined to the local area network, or LAN, rather than the wider WAN, so only devices on the home network can reach the files.

For access from outside the home, the guide points to HFS, short for HTTP File Server, a free application for Windows and Macs that should be version 3.2.1 or later. Users copy the drive's network path or drag the volume into the open HFS window to share it. Engadget flags two conditions: the home computer must stay on with HFS running, and exposing local folders to the open internet can be risky if the files include bills or a copy of a driver's license rather than a photo of a dog. It recommends the free program ngrok, which generates a secure web link for remote access and requires some command-line setup but little maintenance afterward; ngrok must also be running on the home computer while files are shared.

A further use is physical login security. The guide describes installing a program such as USB Raptor on a Windows machine and inserting a thumb drive to log in, presenting the stick as an extra layer beyond a password.

Across the projects, the guide treats the hardware as a small private alternative to hosted services, with the trade-off that a home computer or router has to stay powered and configured correctly.