Connecting USB Drive

While your post is not abundantly clear. Yes that should work fine if you are connecting the USB drive to the router / gateway device via the USB to ethernet adapter. The drive should then be visible to any ethernet connected or any WiFi connected computer that is on your home network.

Whether it would work or not depends on the adapter you use.  Some will, some won't allow the drive to be recognized.  Your router may well have a USB port for connecting external storage devices.  You may also connect the external hard drive to a computer, and in the computer share the drive.  The down side of this is that the computer that the hard drive is attached to will have to stay on all the time, which with modern computers is not an issue.  If you decide to go with the latter, make sure you set the hard drive to no go to sleep, as some hard drives will not wake up gracefully from requests from other devices on the network.  You should also make sure that windows power management does not allow the USB port to be turned off by the OS when not in use. 

@NoNoBadPuppy wrote: "Whether it would work or not depends on the adapter you use.  Some will, some won't allow the drive to be recognized."

For the benefit of all readers here, would you please elaborate on how one would differentiate between the ones that will work and ones that won't work ? Thanks.

@NoNoBadPuppy wrote: "Your router may well have a USB port for connecting external storage devices. 

FWIW. From what they have stated, it sounds like they are using a Comcast-supplied gateway device. If that is the case, then the USB port(s) is /are disabled.

It is simply trial and error.  I have not yet found a way to distinguish those that work and those that do not; there is nothing in the specifications that help determine it.  In the years that USB has existed, I have tried too numerous to count usb to ethernet adapters, both in the business and the consumer world, and have always found that some do a very good job with external HDD's others do not.

As for the comment about the USB port on the router i posted 'may well have a USB port for connecting external storage devices".  The OP did not specify what modem/router they are using, so what I posted is valid. 

We can argue semantics all you want; if the port is disabled, then there is no harm in trying. At least it will eliminate that port as a connection for his external HDD.

Uhhh, who's arguing ???

And shouldn't a USB to ethernet adapter be just a passthrough device ?

Hi, thanks for all the responses.  I am the OP.   I didn’t say what type of modem/ router it is but I did say that I did say knew the USB ports are disabled.  It is a Comcast unit, they disable the ports.   I do have Internal HDDs in an old tower PC that are available via the PC being on the network.  However, that is the only use for the PC.   I don’t want to have to keep it on 24/7, I don’t want to keep it at all, just for the storage.  
I have two, 2 terabyte portable USB drives that I want to connect to the router.  There are 2 or 3 Ethernet ports on the modem/router that are functional.  That’s why I’m looking into a USB to Ethernet adapter.

NoNoBadPuppy,  do you have the model number of the Anker adapter that works for you?  I’d like to avoid trying random adapters to see If I can find one that works and instead try one that has been known to work in the past.

If I can’t get this to work I may buy a NAS device or my own modem/router with USB ports.  Comcast support has told me that the USB ports on a third party unit would work.  That leads me to believe that Comcast disables the ports at the modem firmware level rather than at the  ISP level, if that makes sense.

Hmmmm, maybe another option.  I have a stand alone router that may have USB ports.  If I were to connect this router to the Comcast router via Ethernet, might that work or would having two routers screw things up?  I’d just go try it but I don’t have the router here right now.

Thanks again.