[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by drjd

Actually its not a need-based question as I rarely do transfer my books or photos or music between my computer and phone, but it is rather a theoretical question, because ideally every device connected on the same network should have inter-access to each other. When the phones and computers can access the central HDD flawlessly, why do they not access each other on the same network and map their storages as network drives?

Ideals and reality often do not converge.

Back when, for example, I was an IT support guy whose primary responsibility was administration of some *nix servers. Users running Windows needed to access the *nix file systems. That was provided through an open source package called Samba, which could expose the *nix boxes as file systems that could be mapped as drives in Windows. Worked just fine if you ran Win2K or better. Didn't work on Win98 SE because Samba required an ID and password to authenticate, and Win98 SE didn't support the authentication method used to provide it. I had a user still running 98SE that needed access and it couldn't be provided. (The company finally bit the bullet and moved everyone to XP on the desktop, which was another can of worms.)

I remember an year back or two, when I used another android phone, it's contents were mapped as a network drive on my computer, and similarly, I could access the HDD's of my computer from the file manager (eg. ES File Explorer or ASUS File Manager) apps on my phone. In fact, I want to establish an ideal network with full accessibility and sharing enabled between the devices connected on the network. This now apparently has become a task beyond my technical knowledge, I guess.

What older phone was it, and what version of Android did it run? What model is your new phone, and what Android version does it run?

Part of the difference may be in Android. Newer versions of Android are increasingly security conscious, and this results in suddenly not being able to do things that worked before, because Android won't let you do them.

For example, one utility I've run on Android devices for years is an open source app called OS Monitor. It's the equivalent of *nix top or something like Windows Task Manager. It lists all running processes, and can order them by CPU or memory usage. As of Android 7 Nougat, it no longer works. Nougat denies permission to read the proc filesystem where that info is stored, so OS Monitor can only see it's own info. Apparently, this is the case even if the device is rooted. (And I've been unable to find a rooting solution that works for Marshmallow, let alone Nougat. So much for being able to remove vendor installed bloatware, which gets installed as Systems apps you must be rooted to be able to remove they aren't in the standard uninstall list.)

As another example, Android Kit Kat caused commotion because of how it handled access to external storage. Plug a microSD card into your device, and any app could see anything on the card. The issue is that microSD cards come formatted as FAT32 or exFAT, and FAT filesystems don't have places to store security metadata like owner or group owner belongs to, because they date from the days when MSDOS and later Windows were not multi-user and there was only one user on a system. To plug a security hole, Kit Kat imposed directory level security. The app could only see its own directory on a card. This wreaked havoc on things like file managers who could no longer see the whole card, and so much for managing files on the card.

As far as the transfer of media is concerned, I can resort to connecting the phone through USB or take a longer route to first copy and paste the files to my central storage HDD and then again copying them from the destination device. But this is not an ideal situation.

No, it's not, but how often do you need to?

Your Wifi router includes NAS storage, so you have central storage all connected devices can see and back up to. Mine does not, and separate storage storage in an external enclosure connected via USB3 is a down the road project there's no hurry about because I don't really need the capacity now.

Absent info I don't currently have, it sounds like the answer to your question is "It can't be done. Sorry." The good part, such as it is, is that you don't normally need to.
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Dennis