Accessing my external hard drives via Wifi

[vgoklani]

Hi,

I have two daisy-chained external harddrives that I would like to access via Wifi on my Macbook Pro (the drives have both USB2 and firewire 800 ports - obviously I will have to use the USB2). I have seen a few devices by Netgear and Linksys, but I am an apple person (I have two airport extremes) and I would like the most apple-friendly product. Any recommendations? I read somewhere that the Linksys stuff requires a Win32 formatted drive, which may pose a problem.

 

[blodwyn]

Hi,

I have two daisy-chained external harddrives that I would like to access via Wifi on my Macbook Pro (the drives have both USB2 and firewire 800 ports - obviously I will have to use the USB2). I have seen a few devices by Netgear and Linksys, but I am an apple person (I have two airport extremes) and I would like the most apple-friendly product. Any recommendations? I read somewhere that the Linksys stuff requires a Win32 formatted drive, which may pose a problem.

The Linksys box is not too difficult to configure, but it formats the drives to (I think) ext2 file system format. This is no problem if you keep the drives on the Linksys but could be a problem if you want to move them around. Performance is not spectacular - significantly slower than direct connect. Good enough for small files but large file transfers take a while.

 

[superbovine]

I would recommended against wifi if you have very large files as well.