Can you use an airport extreme to allow two computers, a PC and a mac, to share a connected networked hard drive? Do you need Bonjour to do this? Can it do this out of the box, Or is it impossible? I got one yesterday and only have the mac seeing the hard drive... Any help would be great.
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Airport Extreme + Hard Drive + PC + MAC?
- Thread starter sammyman
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Works for sure. You need to install the accompanying airport software on the Windows PC though. It will add the airdisk utility to allow you to connect to the mounts. As soon as you do so, drive letters are automatically mapped for you under My Computer.
Thanks! Does it not matter then how I format the drive for it to be accessible by both PC + MAC?
Format it as HFS+ Journaled and it will be readable just fine by the Windows PC. It accesses it via SAMBA/CFS.
It can now? then what's the point in buying macdrive for windows? I thought windows didn't understand HFS
It's not accessing HFS... the Airport is. A network file sharing protocol is used over the network, not the raw file system commands (which is one of the reasons it can be a bit slow... the small router processor has to manage the conversion). "SAMBA" is the open source/UNIX implementation of the standard windows file sharing protocols (SMB and CIFS), while NFS is the UNIX standard.