Possible to share external drives automatically?

[Samm]

We have a Monterey OSX Mac Mini which is used to share external drive arrays that we receive to our Windows machines.

It is a bit of a process when an external drive arrives, in which an admin must then (on the Mac Mini) share the drive and setup permissions so that 'everyone' can see the drive. We'd like to make this an automatic process, so that the following happens:

If an external mac drive or array is connected to the mini, the mini would then share that drive and make it available to all users (which are usually windows users accessing via smb). The windows users can then see the share via a UNC path (i.e. \\MacMini4\ExternalDrive3)

Possible?

 

[Nurgle2024]

I am pretty sure windows won't see Mac formatted Disks in any Mac OS format (I may be wrong)... I think they would have to be windows formatted MS-Dos, which Macs can see no problem..

regards, Sandy

 

[TonyAguila]

We have a Monterey OSX Mac Mini which is used to share external drive arrays that we receive to our Windows machines.

It is a bit of a process when an external drive arrives, in which an admin must then (on the Mac Mini) share the drive and setup permissions so that 'everyone' can see the drive. We'd like to make this an automatic process, so that the following happens:

If an external mac drive or array is connected to the mini, the mini would then share that drive and make it available to all users (which are usually windows users accessing via smb). The windows users can then see the share via a UNC path (i.e. \\MacMini4\ExternalDrive3)

Possible?

If I may offer a different route, without any additional hardware, give iCloud Drive a try. You can run iCloud Drive on Windows, although I don’t have any personal experience with it. Depending on your internet connection, cloud synchronization should work transparently. If you find this to be a feasible solution, you could subscribe to a higher tier of iCloud Drive to hold all of your shared files. If iCloud does not work, you cannot say that you didn’t try. A NAS drive could be in your future.