I want to attach my printer and my 1tb drive to my network without pluging it into a pc, i have been looking at the belkin Network USB Hub, seems to do what i want but it says it requires windows, now i have 2 windows machines on this network (its wireless) and i have a mac on it, so will the belkin do the job, if not what will? it must support Mac and Windows

m using 802.11n router from Apple (The Airport), it works like a charm for USB storage sharing and printer, sadly there is only 1 port. If the belkin one support USB port sharing across the router it should be okay.

  Edited by: candycgiz

Just remember to keep the file system writable by Windows and Mac, If you formated the drive with OSX journaled FS you can still access them in windows using software like MacDrive, it's a commercial apps though

Personally I use an old PC (Athlon 1800) with FreeNAS to handle all of my network storage. That doesn't help much for the printer, but if you have an old PC lying around it might be worth looking into. It's free and files can be read from my PC and Mac. Then all you have to worry about is getting a small print server for cheap.

But using a full PC is not very energy efficient though

It's actually a SFF PC, but you're right, it's not the most energy-efficient. However, since I don't have to pay anything for the hardware it is very cost-efficient!