Airport Extreme & MyBook Essential - Are they any good together?

[jamin100]

Hi Guys,

I have a 1TB western Digital MyBook essential that I have partitioned into 2 drives. One for time machine and one for data storage.

At the moment i have a very old 802.11b access point connected to my cable (Virgin Media - UK) modem.

I'm looking to buy the new Airport Extreme to make use of the faster speeds and also the USB disk sharing feature. I have 1 macbook and 1 XP laptop that will need to access the mybook over the WIFI.

My questions:

1) Is this setup reliable? or am i going to have trouble accessing the disk and have to keep resetting the AE

2) Is backing up to time machine viable over the wireless? its only backing up my system partition which at the moment is only 20GB.

3) Will the Airport Extreme automatically spin down the WD MyBook when not in use?

4) Can you see any problems with any of the above!


Cheers

 

[heppy]

It'll work fine but as ever having your backup and data storage on the same physical disk is a universally bad idea, trust me, been there, done that, lost the lot, never again!

Get yourself another disk to attach to your mac for time machine, it'll be quicker anyway and safer.

 

[jamin100]

It'll work fine but as ever having your backup and data storage on the same physical disk is a universally bad idea, trust me, been there, done that, lost the lot, never again!

Get yourself another disk to attach to your mac for time machine, it'll be quicker anyway and safer.

Thanks for the input.

this drive isnt my only backup solution.

All my Data is stored on a Data partition on my local hard drive (320GB)

Time machine > WD Mybook (500GB parition)
Data Partition > WD Mybook (500GB partition)
Data Partition > WD Passport (250GB)
Important Data (Photos', Home Movies etc) > Zumodrive (cloud storage)

Although the time machine partition would be the only instance of time machine that I keep, I'm not too worried as I'd just reinstall leopard anyway.