OK, I have been searching this and other forums (fora?) for an answer to whether or not one can mount an external USB hard drive to an Airport Extreme Base Station and have that drive available to (i.e., mounted on) a mac using that AEBS as it's primary router; I have not come across a definitive reading (can anyone point to a good thread that gets to the root of the issue?), but here's what I understand so far:
One cannot use such a mounted disk as a TimeMachine disk; there may be some hacks that allow this, and maybe some day Apple will update the firmware, that may frustrate some, but I dont really need this, I have a dedicated FW800 disk that I will connect directly.
There are many threads that point to more difficulty involving LaCie disks
Apple talks about making sure that such disks must be formatted as HFS+, have only one partition (no RAID settings) and use 512 sized blocks
Many posts indicating that the current AEBS Firmware is flaky in this regard and some have rolled back to a previous version to solve the problem.
All I wish to do is mount a drive and use it to free up some space on my MBP drive by moving iTunes and iPhoto/Aperture main databases there; I can do that now with a USB drive connected to my MBP but would prefer to have these files available via wireless, so I can roam about the house.
A lot of folk seem to be returning their AEBS purchases because of inability to set this up.
bottom line, is there a definitive answer on whether one can mount a USB drive on a AEBS?
One cannot use such a mounted disk as a TimeMachine disk; there may be some hacks that allow this, and maybe some day Apple will update the firmware, that may frustrate some, but I dont really need this, I have a dedicated FW800 disk that I will connect directly.
There are many threads that point to more difficulty involving LaCie disks
Apple talks about making sure that such disks must be formatted as HFS+, have only one partition (no RAID settings) and use 512 sized blocks
Many posts indicating that the current AEBS Firmware is flaky in this regard and some have rolled back to a previous version to solve the problem.
All I wish to do is mount a drive and use it to free up some space on my MBP drive by moving iTunes and iPhoto/Aperture main databases there; I can do that now with a USB drive connected to my MBP but would prefer to have these files available via wireless, so I can roam about the house.
A lot of folk seem to be returning their AEBS purchases because of inability to set this up.
bottom line, is there a definitive answer on whether one can mount a USB drive on a AEBS?