Sharing hard drive on Boxee Box disrupts local network

[favouritegadget]

Well after all this, and plenty of time spent, the specific problem won't be answered because the external hard drive has broken down. Well not the drive, but the enclosure is only sending a signal to the USB intermittently or not at all, so I can't actually test it. It's a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus (1TB) and it was doing this on my desktop and I thought it was a problem with the desktop USB ports, I moved it up to the Boxee Box and it was working fine there, now it's not.

Despite that I don't believe the faulty USB connection was causing the network problem. If I have to make a guess, I think it was an overloaded network - I only recently added the tablet to it so it's laptop, blackberry, tablet, and boxee box on the wireless network, plus desktop wired, and the HDD on boxee with slower speed and heavier reliance on the network (when on the desktop, half of that transfer was wired). All too much for my measly old G network is my guess. I could be wrong of course.

I purchased a D-Link extreme N (single band) router with USB and will set that up tonight, and meanwhile I'll be cracking open my OneTouch HDD to salvage the irreplaceable home movies on the drive!

Thanks for all the help, I learned a fair bit about firmware, wireshark, etc.