AirPort Disk: Easy Network Storage

The Airport Extreme Base Station while a great product, destroyed my internet bandwidth. I didn't figure it out right away but I paid extra for an 8Mb pipe from the cable company only to find that when my AEBS was involved - wired or wireless - it stripped my speed down to a 768Kb/s at best download speed.

I've since gotten a Netgear but the idea of upgrading to N on my Mac Pro and the disk sharing capability obviously has some appeal, but not at the expense of wasting my internet bandwidth

I'm curious as to why the new AEBS does not support gigabit ethernet. And I wonder if a NAS model may arrive in the future with a built-in disk. I expect that we'll see special external disk enclosures similar to the ones for the mac mini that will stack with the AEBS.

Finally, after dissing 802.11a, has Apple indicated why the AEBS includes it? The apple TV does not.

--Chris

Thanks again.

Does anyone know if the Apple TV also acts like a base station?

Can't see why it would have been a huge problem to add this in, if they're already using custom embedded software, but no doubt there are good reasons.

http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10727

Can anybody else give me a better reason as to why the Airport Extreme is the size it is?

Any Chance of a BT Client / Download Manger?
FTP Server?

Thanks,

--Chris

The problem with the AEBS is that it's missing a GigE wired interfaces. With a max of wired network speed of 100MB/s, the value of 802.11n, and the value of NAS, is greatly diminished!

I use the wireless to move around the house.

I may have to buy one just to test it. :D

This is WHY people care about the gigE wired ports. With a gigE connection, you might be able to utilize most or all of the bandwidth of the USB 2 drive interface. With 100 base T, you're going to have speeds more like USB 1, even with a USB 2 drive.

What's the chance this Airport Disk Utility will work with the old airport extreme? ie could I attach USB storage to the old AEBS and have it available to the network?

I'd like to have a centralized file server that can stream music to my stereo via Airtunes and an Airport express, using any computer on the network's iTunes as a controller. Maybe eventually get some sort of non-computer music thing for my stereo but initially just centralize my iTunes library here. What happens with music you purchased from the iTunes store if you do this? Would you run into authorization problems?

sorry for my english but I'm french.

Do you think I'll can put an USB 2,5 inches Hard Drive on the new AEBS ?

Thanks.

I tried D-Link DI-624S a while back, but that thing was horrible. Only supported FAT, and wouldn't even see the drive most of the time. I'm hoping the AEBS will make all my dreams come true, but I am skeptical.

(2) The bigger problem is that, at least on my new Airport Extreme N router, the AirPort Disk performance has been intermittend. The drives just seem to vanish off the network for no reason and I have not been able to figure out why or how to get them back up (the also seem to reappear for no reason) - when my shared netork drive is offline for hours at a time for no apparent reason, it's not very useful for ANY purpose.

Thanks,

Rob

The My Book hard drive is formatted as HFS+ (Journaled) and my Windows Vista machine connects to it (through the AEBS) using SMB/CIFS and it appears to WV as a FAT32 drive.

I tried to format as HFS+ but my Airport Extreme detected an error and refused to mount the drive. I think you need to update your article.
What makes this even more difficult is XP cannot format as FAT32 anything larger than 32GB. You have to find another utility to do this. Ug, I hate Windows problems!
Colin

I formated the drive from my G5 as HFS+. The AEBS will network to PCs via Samba regardless of the drive format, so there theoretically should not be any advantage to using FAT32 unless you need to connect it directly to a PC. In fact, using FAT32 will force Macs to use Samba to connect to the drive from what I understand. My guess is that the version of Samba Apple is using has a 2GB filesize limit as far as that issue goes.

I can print to my HP LaserJet 1022 from both Mac and PCs but for some reason the PC won't authenticate the attached drive, even as a guest. It works fine on the Macs, so I can only assume it's some problem with Windows XP Home (the only XP version I have at that location). It's an older Dell laptop which has had other network problems, so I can't say if this is an isolated incident or not.

I'm not really worried about the lack of a gigabit port for now and I don't think this device was designed for the purpose that the people who are worried about the lack of it are. Sure, it would be nice to use it as a giga-switch, but I doubt that most people will be using the ethernet connections at all. Couldn't you have a giga-switch attached to this device and get around the problem that way? You could have as many ports and level of management that you needed for your wired uses and still use the wireless features of the AEBS. Yes, you would have to have any network drives attached to a computer on the giga network to use shared drives at that speed, but if that's what you need, again, I don't think this is the device for it -- set up a little Linux box for your NAS. (This is essentially what I do in my office with the Express.)

Also, the 802.11n standard has a spec of 100-200 Mbps for typical datarate (I doubt you will see 700 Mbps in real use), so it's not going to slow down anything attached to the ethernet port all that much.

The one thing I would be worried about is if the Express for AirTunes would slow down the network since it is a 802.11g device -- would this negate the advantages of the "n" speed?

Here's where I get confused. With iTunes, I was able to add the same music library across all the computers. However, I'm having trouble ripping CD music from the PCs. Also, I will be adding an additional iPod to the system (for use on one of the PCs). Can someone point me in the right direction? I haven't seen a similar issue -- combining a Mac, PC, Airport Extreme, HD, iTunes and multiple iPods -- out there.

Anyone? Thanks!

Using Airport Extreme with netdrive to stream lossless music files to my stereo via and airport express.

I can occasionally get the setup to work, but only at night? Usually I just get intermittent music playing. I have even placed my laptop, next to the airport extreme (3 feet) and airport express and still have had problems (even with a 70% signal)

I believe the problem is between the laptop and the airport extreme since I can see that my incomming music file is not keeping up (I can see this in the Itunes graphic equalizer).

I'm wondering if I don't have enough band width on my laptop or the airport extreme to stream full size music files from hardrive on airport extreme to laptop and then to airport express?

Please note, I had and have no problems streaming lossless files from the laptop hardrive to the airport express.

Internet connection between laptop and airport extreme is great.

Any thoughts would ge much appreciated.

Thanks

Works great!

ssh and telnet don't seem to be supported, nor is there anything in the Disk Utility, at least from what I can see.