Airport Extreme and External Hard Drive
Hi
I have an airport extreme base station connected to me router which serves 2 Macs. My mac mini is hard wired from the back of the airport by Cat 6 and my MBP is connected by 802.11n.
I am looking to add an external hard drive to plug into the USB on the back of the Airport so that I can access this from both Macs but before I do I wondered if by adding this my wireless will slow to g speed? I am aware that if I connected the mini via the wireless card this would be the case, hence the reason why I have left it hard wired.
Could anyone help please.
Thanks
Skier
I have an airport extreme base station connected to me router which serves 2 Macs. My mac mini is hard wired from the back of the airport by Cat 6 and my MBP is connected by 802.11n.
I am looking to add an external hard drive to plug into the USB on the back of the Airport so that I can access this from both Macs but before I do I wondered if by adding this my wireless will slow to g speed? I am aware that if I connected the mini via the wireless card this would be the case, hence the reason why I have left it hard wired.
Could anyone help please.
Thanks
Skier
Comments
Please do report your experiences back in this forum sometime.
The problem is I really have no opportunity to try before I buy.
Having thought further I would be grateful if you could answer me another question. Say I connected to the extreme wirelessly from both my mini and mbp. The mini would be via g and the mbp n, is the drop to g level only applicable when I am drawing information from the router or does the network permanently run at g as my mini is connected. For example, say the mini was in sleep but connected to extreme and I was working solely on the mbp
I hope that makes sense if you want me to try and explain more please let me know.
So, correct me of I am wrong but if I plug an external hard drive into the USB connection on the back of my extreme then the mini will access this via the hard wired connection and not via wireless. Therefore I can continue to run pure n to my MBP which will access the drive via wireless?
Thanks for your help. to finish off.....
So, correct me of I am wrong but if I plug an external hard drive into the USB connection on the back of my extreme then the mini will access this via the hard wired connection and not via wireless. Therefore I can continue to run pure n to my MBP which will access the drive via wireless?
Now this part I cannot verify 100%. I can only research this for you in one or two days time, I think. I want to give you a definite answer.
Thanks for your help. to finish off.....
So, correct me of I am wrong but if I plug an external hard drive into the USB connection on the back of my extreme then the mini will access this via the hard wired connection and not via wireless. Therefore I can continue to run pure n to my MBP which will access the drive via wireless?
Yes. Okay I checked. What you should do is connect the hard drive to the USB connection of the Airport Extreme. Then hard wire the Mini to the Airport Extreme. Make sure you turn off the wireless on the Mac Mini. Now run Airport Extreme in pure-N mode.
Your Mac Mini will access the hard disk as fast as the USB2.0 connection, and the router processing, can handle. I am getting 45mbit/sec receiving data from the hard disk. Maybe a bit low, but remember the Airport Extreme is serving about almost 10 other computers wirelessly. Additionally, there is other network traffic flying around since the Airport Extreme is running bridged mode off a wired network served all by a Linksys Router.
The above config I recommended, I think you will get a nice external / Airport Extreme experience.
I am using Lacie Porsche 250gb USB2.0 with AC adaptor 7200rpm external drive.
I have thought of another alternative which I would appreciate some views on, given my set up listed above how do I connect the 2 macs directly? At the moment I have a MBP running wireless through extreme on 802.11n. My mini is using the extreme as a bypass and is connected by ethernet.
Is there any way to connect from my MBP to my mini without using wireless which will slow my whole system down?
In simple terms I will send a request from MBP to extreme requesting access to mini, the question is how do I set this up?
Thanks
Richard
I have now tried to wire the ext drive through my airport which works and I can see it from both Macs, but the disk keeps spinning permanently.
I have thought of another alternative which I would appreciate some views on, given my set up listed above how do I connect the 2 macs directly? At the moment I have a MBP running wireless through extreme on 802.11n. My mini is using the extreme as a bypass and is connected by ethernet.
Is there any way to connect from my MBP to my mini without using wireless which will slow my whole system down?
In simple terms I will send a request from MBP to extreme requesting access to mini, the question is how do I set this up?
Thanks
Richard
Given the set-up you have described above I would recommend getting another Cat 6 cable and running it as a gigabit ethernet connection--you won't find a faster connection than that.
If, however, you want to do this sans-router, I believe firewire will be your best bet.