Airport Extreme and self powered USB

[atacinus]

Will it work together for wireless time machine backups? Or does it require a hard drive with a separate power source?

Thanks!

 

[Eidorian]

If your drive is bus powered over a single cable it won't need an AC adapter.

 

[atacinus]

Right, but will that work with the airport extreme? I'm just not sure if I can draw the power from that....

 

[Eidorian]

I had my WD Passport running just fine on my Airport Extreme. The USB port on does provide power.

 

[atacinus]

Awesome - a WD passport is the same drive I was looking at - thanks so much!

 

[J&JPolangin]

...usually 3.5" External Drives have power supplies with them and for the same rotational speed they perform better than the 2.5" External drive equivalents... plus usually you can get a 1TB drive for the price of a 500 GB portable now and more storage is better😀

 

[Ruahrc]

But I think in this kind of situation the performance bottleneck is coming from the wireless connection and not the hard disk. Perhaps if you're connected via ethernet you might notice a difference but if you're accessing the drive wirelessly then the difference between 2.5 and 3.5 isn't going to matter?