Airport Extreme Airdisk or other networking solution

[sanclemente]

I used to have an old PC that I used as a network server in a mixed PC/Mac environment. I used it as a print/network server to do simple backup, keep all my music, and do some back up jobs for my PC. It just finally crapped out, motherboard is bad but the hard drives are good. I could easily drop them into an enclosure. I was considering alternatives and just saw the apple airdisk. I have external drives for both the PC and MacBooks. I have two questions:
I have an old Airport Extreme 802.11g - does it support AirDisk? If not, is it work upgrading?

What are other suggestions for creating a networked hard drive that don't involve buying a brand new computer?

 

[kolax]

It is only the 802.11n Airport Extreme that has the option for an AirDisk.

It is worth upgrading - the AirDisk works a treat. You can also set up your AirDisk so you can access it anywhere in the world too.

 

[DoFoT9]

I used to have an old PC that I used as a network server in a mixed PC/Mac environment. I used it as a print/network server to do simple backup, keep all my music, and do some back up jobs for my PC. It just finally crapped out, motherboard is bad but the hard drives are good. I could easily drop them into an enclosure. I was considering alternatives and just saw the apple airdisk. I have external drives for both the PC and MacBooks. I have two questions:
I have an old Airport Extreme 802.11g - does it support AirDisk? If not, is it work upgrading?

What are other suggestions for creating a networked hard drive that don't involve buying a brand new computer?

my ~1 year old AEBS 802.11g supports airdisk (it works but doesnt use a program called airdisk, you have to do it manually). i wouldnt really recommend this, if you are going to be doing backups and the like arport will only get about 1mb-3.5mbps transfer rates.

i would probably suggest a gigabit/firewire enclosure to transfer data, or another file server because that is simply the best and fastest option

 

[kolax]

my ~1 year old AEBS 802.11g supports airdisk (it works but doesnt use a program called airdisk, you have to do it manually). i wouldnt really recommend this, if you are going to be doing backups and the like arport will only get about 1mb-3.5mbps transfer rates.

The old version of the Airport Extreme doesn't support USB hard drives...aka AirDisk.

 

[DoFoT9]

The old version of the Airport Extreme doesn't support USB hard drives...aka AirDisk.

mine does

 

[kolax]

mine does

Really? AFAIK the USB port was for printers only, it didn't have the brains for hard drives.

Got any more info on that? I'm curious as to how I've missed that making the news.

 

[DoFoT9]

Really? AFAIK the USB port was for printers only, it didn't have the brains for hard drives.

Got any more info on that? I'm curious as to how I've missed that making the news.

ok **** mybad it doesnt support it. im a stupid idiot.

 

[grockk]

airdisk is great. I had a P3 Win 2000 server that i replaced with the new extreme.

having airdisk access from any net connection is awesome. I have a music library that grabs from the airdisk and it works with no drops even when i went overseas. printing works from anywhere too (but doesn't really make sense)

now you do lose out on having a real server. some limitations i've found is that you can't format or rename disks from airdisk. you have to connect the disk by usb directly to the computer.

Any NAS is going to be slower than a server. but it is quick enough for nightly backups as long as you set it up for incremental instead of writing everything.

Also if one user is attached to the airdisk, it is slower for a second user. so if you need simultaneous data access from multiple computers it can get pokey. and you can not access the same file at the same time. But for home it's usually not an issue.

so i do miss some features but consider it took less than 10 minutes to set up and no maintenance compared to all i had to do running the other P3 it is well worth it.

buy the new one and ebay the other.