Using older airport extreme base station with intel macs

[steve51]

Hi

I'm looking at taking the plunge & setting up a basic home network for my Mac mini 2.GHz & Macbook (possibly adding my wife's Windows laptop at some stage - she has to visit the dark side for work!:) I want to share a Canon MP510 printer & a large, yet to be purchased, external hard drive. Two questions:

1) Will one of the older 802.11g airport extreme base stations (the dome shaped model) be ok?

2) should I look at USB hard drives or could I connect an ethernet drive to the base station?

All help appreciated. Us newbies got to start somewhere!

Steve

[ChrisA]

Originally Posted by steve51

Hi

I'm looking at taking the plunge & setting up a basic home network for my Mac mini 2.GHz & Macbook (possibly adding my wife's Windows laptop at some stage - she has to visit the dark side for work!:) I want to share a Canon MP510 printer & a large, yet to be purchased, external hard drive. Two questions:

1) Will one of the older 802.11g airport extreme base stations (the dome shaped model) be ok?

2) should I look at USB hard drives or could I connect an ethernet drive to the base station?

All help appreciated. Us newbies got to start somewhere!

Steve

I didn't think that the older AP base station supported disk drives on their
USB ports. I'm pretty sure that feature came with the new square shaped
routers.

The simplest thing would be to connect a drive to the Mac Mini and share that over the network. It would mean leaving the mini on 24x7 but Minis don't use much power and they can spin the drive down when it is not in use. The routers never power the drives down so over all the mini may be a "win"

An "ethernet drive" is really just a computer with a shared drive, just like you would make using the Mini. Connect it to the network just like you
would any other computer. I'd go with this option if you did not want to
leave the Min running 24x7.

[steve51]

Thanks - I hadn't thought of that solution. Might just visit the local Apple store tomorrow & look at the current AP base station. New to networking too so bit of a learning curve going on here!