airport extreme- hard drive connected via USB or Ethernet?

The Lacie drive over ethernet will work fine but if you just want it for Time Machine then USB is all you need. The USB drive will be faster yet and very stable. Also, Time Machine backups to a drive connected to an Airport Extreme are not officially supported by Apple. They sell the (expensive) Time Capsule disk/router combo for that purpose.

Lots of folks have been able to get this type of setup (Extreme and disk combo) working though but just letting you know that Apple won't be of any help if you have issues. Cheers!

James
 
they dont support it even though they advertise it as a main feature?? http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/features/harddrivesharing.html thats nuts.

but anyways, maybe im approaching my problem the wrong way? I have a macbook air, I want to store most of my files on an external hard drive, and be able to watch movies or use files from that hard drive at any time, thats what i wanted it connected to a network. if i got a second hard drive for time machine only, can it backup both the hard drive and my macbook?
 
AirDisk is not synonymous with Time Machine over AirDisk. Apple supports AirDisk just fine, but backing up to a hard drive connected to an AirPort Extreme via USB using Time Machine is not.

What I would suggest is purchasing a NAS that's capable of Time Machine backups out of the box (ie, it must have AFP). Then you can partition the drive to have a Time Machine only partition and a general file sharing partition. Although Time Machine will not be able to back up any network attached drives, so if you want redundancy of your data, either set up another backup method and/or get a NAS with mirrored RAID capability.
 
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