Hi Everyone

I get the error message "insufficient band width" (or maybe it was 
"insufficient resources"), every time I try to access either of the two 
500 GB USB2 hard drives *over* my home network.

Technical information about the computers and the network:

My network uses two Netgear 10/100 switches. Two of the four computers 
have WD 7200RPM 500GB "My Book" external drives attached via USB2.

Three computers are desktops, each with SIIG USB2/Ethernet combo PCI 
cards. These desktops are running Win2k Pro SP4. My fourth computer is 
a laptop with either WinXP Pro SP4 or Win2K SP2 (can boot to either). 
Basically, I can't access either external hard drive from any computer 
other than the one that it's directly attached to. All resources are 
properly shared and permissions are properly set. I have no problem 
accessing or transferring files between any *internal* drive on any of 
the four computers and any of the other computers via Ethernet. Both 
external drives are formatted as FAT32, the internal drives on the four 
computers are a mixture of FAT32 and NTFS. All computers are running 
Zone Alarm, but it doesn't affect file transfers between the computers. 
There is an external hardware firewall between the Internet and my 
little network but since the four computers and their two switches are 
all inside this firewall, it shouldn't be a factor with my problem.

Comments:

I don't know if the problem is with the size of the 500 GB external 
drives or if it's an operating system problem (maybe limitations 
imposed by Microsoft because I'm not using a Server version of Windows) 
or a technical Ethernet problem, or whether the problem is with the 
chipsets on the Silicon Graphics USB2/Ethernet cards.

The problem is not with the number of drives in any computer (or over 
the network). If I disable (pull the plug on) one or more of the 
internal drives before booting, I still can't access either of the 
external drives over the Ethernet. Each of the three desktops is a dual 
1400 GHz P3 machine, the laptop is a 2.4 GHz P4. It doesn't seem to 
mater how many computers are actually booted (two, three, four) as far 
as the problem goes.

Anybody have any ideas? I'd like to be able to make and store backups 
on the external drives over the network.

Regards,
Bill

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