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New Airport Extreme

fjmeat

fjmeat

Diamond Member
I installed an Airport Extreme (802.11ac wifi) today. It has features to hook up a USB External HDD drive to it. However, I tried two different USB External Hard Drives, but the Airport does not reflect anything being plugged in? What's up?
 
You using AirPort Utility to configure the drives? They will need to be formatted with HFS+ if they haven't been already.
 
Now that the external drive is working, I'd like to access it from outside my network. I don't think its possible though. I'd like to be able to access the contents of the external HDD plugged directly into the Airport Extreme from anywhere, using either a mac or a pc.

Doing so would let me dump my old computer currently used as file sever with remote desktop function.
 
fjmeat said:
Now that the external drive is working, I'd like to access it from outside my network. I don't think its possible though. I'd like to be able to access the contents of the external HDD plugged directly into the Airport Extreme from anywhere, using either a mac or a pc.

Doing so would let me dump my old computer currently used as file sever with remote desktop function.
Click to expand...

I've got one coming on Wednesday, but I read on the Apple site that it WAS possible to access it from the WAN, not just from the LAN. Probably a firewall setting?
 
There are several ways to do it. The easy way is with iCloud, which only works on Mac IIRC. Otherwise you can get into doing some more complicated Wide-Area Bonjour setup.

Or simply take the public IP of the router and connect to the share. I believe there is a setting in AirPort utility that says "Allow access to disks over WAN" or something to that affect.
 
I'd be interested in seeing the kinds of file transfer speeds you're getting on the external USB drive.
 
I'm also curious for a comparison between internal and external storage. My Time Capsule is due in on Wednesday and I have an external on hand that I may do some comparisons with.
 
Tegeril said:
I'm also curious for a comparison between internal and external storage. My Time Capsule is due in on Wednesday and I have an external on hand that I may do some comparisons with.
Click to expand...

It's USB2, so don't expect much - you'll be limited by that if nothing else.
 
Do we know whether this new AE will work with a USB-connected drive for Time Machine? I know that is not officially supported, but it's always worked fine on my 802.11n AE.
 
RampantAndroid said:
It's USB2, so don't expect much - you'll be limited by that if nothing else.
Click to expand...

I know, but USB2 is not going to limit anything if it performs near theoretical maximums for anything via wireless. At least wrt general throughput as it doesn't look like AC can even push much more than 500mbit in the best circumstances.

So yes, via gigabit ethernet, it'll limit, but in general, I'm curious of the performance of the internal drive by comparison.

I haven't had a chance to test it yet.
 
For the record, sharing a hard drive from USB is *the worst* experience. Apple articles reference some airport disk utility gone from 10.7 and up...and in the end it seems you need to just use the "back to my mac" functionality. By the time I got sharing to work it was too late to try a benchmark. I've got a Samsung 840 Pro currently hooked up over the USB2 connection, so theoretically all limitations I see will be due to the USB limitations. I'll try it out tonight, if I can.
 
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