Looking for good External Hard Drive for Airport Express Base Station-USB Hub
I have one of the new Airport Express Base Station's on the way and will be using a Hard Drive on it as a server for my home network. I"m interested in suggestions. Since this is bieng used on a large desk I don't need anything compact but definitely want a reliable drive and I"m looking at sizes of 540Gigs to 1TB.
I have looked at the Lacie's Little Big Disk as well as Western Digital's My Book Pro series and some of maxtor's offerings such as the One Touch III. I didn't see anything impressive from Seagate. Any other companies I should look at? I obviously need USB 2.0 but as well I'd like Firewire 400 and if possible Firewire 800 so I can use these when I need to hook into the computer locally for faster speeds. I think Ethernet would be nice for future proofing as a network drive but as well as long as Apple has this disk feature in the Base Stations it's probably not a necessity to me. Or am I better off just going with a good Gigabit ethernet drive and not using this USB 2.0 feature?
As well, since I'm going to be hooking up a printer to this as well I'm looking for a good USB 2.0 hub.
I have looked at the Lacie's Little Big Disk as well as Western Digital's My Book Pro series and some of maxtor's offerings such as the One Touch III. I didn't see anything impressive from Seagate. Any other companies I should look at? I obviously need USB 2.0 but as well I'd like Firewire 400 and if possible Firewire 800 so I can use these when I need to hook into the computer locally for faster speeds. I think Ethernet would be nice for future proofing as a network drive but as well as long as Apple has this disk feature in the Base Stations it's probably not a necessity to me. Or am I better off just going with a good Gigabit ethernet drive and not using this USB 2.0 feature?
As well, since I'm going to be hooking up a printer to this as well I'm looking for a good USB 2.0 hub.
Comments
I thought of another question. If I get a drive that has firewire 800 and/or 400 in addition to USB 2.0 can I use the USB 2.0 on the Extreme Base Station across the network and as well for a local desktop computer (I plan to get a Mac Pro within a year) can I hook the firewire directly into that.
In otherwords use it as a netword drive across the computer but yet with the mac pro use it directly as a system drive?
I meant to say Extreme, that definitely makes a difference.
I thought of another question. If I get a drive that has firewire 800 and/or 400 in addition to USB 2.0 can I use the USB 2.0 on the Extreme Base Station across the network and as well for a local desktop computer (I plan to get a Mac Pro within a year) can I hook the firewire directly into that.
In otherwords use it as a netword drive across the computer but yet with the mac pro use it directly as a system drive?
Not at the same time.
As for the big question, I am in the market for an external drive as well (as soon as I can find the cash). But it all changes so quickly that I've learned I just need to do some research in the days before I'm going to purchase. I know that doesn't really help you... sry.
I'd advise against the Airport and an attached USB drive. Access speed will be slower than just about any other solution currently on the market. You'll want either a locally attached drive or one attached via gigabit ethernet.
Yeah, but it'll be as fast (or faster) as an external HD connected to another computer on the wireless network, correct? I presently have a Mac Mini that I'm only using as a print/iTunes server, and I'm planning to sell it off and buy a new Airport to serve those functions (I'd have a USB hub rigged to the Airport so both the HD and the printer can be connected at once).
I just picked up a Lacie 250GB USB 2.0 for $99 from Costco. It's their silver-cased drive enclosure.
When you re-format your new hard drive, what format will you use..FAT 32, HFS+, ...?
I picked the standard HFS+ Journaled that OS X uses. I have no use to share this with anything other than my mac. Of course I didn't *need* to reformat it as OS X easily recognized it's out of the box Windows friendly format.
I currently hate Lacie and/or Apple.
I picked up an Airport Extreme (n) yesterday and tried to attach my triple interface Lacie D2 500 Gig drive via USB.
Error.
The Airport will not recognize it, and insists that there's a disk problem. The drive does work when directly connected to my MBP, though.
An Apple knowledge base article claims that the Airport Extreme only supports HFS+, FAT32 and NTFS while making no mention of journaling, so I turned off journaling on the drive. It made no difference whatsoever.
If I don't solve this issue, the stupid Airport's going back.