Airport Extreme questions please

[nashmills]

If I attach a hfs+ formatted hard drive to an Airport Extreme and connect to it via gigabit ethernet from my Mac Mini what sort of data transfer speeds can I expect?

At the moment I have the hard drive (ntfs fomatted) connected to a Windows pc and get data transfer rates of 30-40MB/s over the network to the Mini.

Also can I connect more than one hard drive to an AEBS using a usb hub?

Any help much appreciated.

 

[spinnerlys]

Depending on what network cable you use, you can get speed up to 70-75MB/s via Gigabit Ethernet, but 40MB/s sounds about right.
It has nothing to do with the file system, as the AEBS is putting a layer on top of that so that everyone using the network can see that drive, independent of what OS they use.
So even Windows user are able to see and use the HFS+ formatted volume connected to the AEBS.

You can connected as many HDDs as you want, the upper limit of USB ports on one port is 128 as far as I can remember.

MRoogle will be able to give you more detailed answers though, as the last question gets asked every month or so.

 

[nashmills]

Thank you Spinnerlys. I asked the question because I tried using a gigabit router with a usb 2.0 port but the data transfer rate from it was a measly 5MB/s, much too slow for my needs. After checking with the manufacturer they confirmed that was all I could expect from the device.

 

[skorpien]

Just to clarify, while spinnerlys' numbers appear right, the unit is unfortunately not. Those numbers should be Mb/s not MB/s. According to reviews of the 1TB Time Capsule (late 2009) on C|Net, the highest write throughput on the TC's NAS via Gigabit Ethernet was 81.2 Mb/s, which translates into 10.15 MB/s. Those are around the same numbers you could expect from a USB attached HDD on the AEBS. I am unsure if that speed is sufficient, but just so you know, you will never get speeds as high as an HDD connected directly to a computer being shared over the network unfortunately.

 

[spinnerlys]

Just to clarify, while spinnerlys' numbers appear right, the unit is unfortunately not. Those numbers should be Mb/s not MB/s. According to reviews of the 1TB Time Capsule (late 2009) on C|Net, the highest write throughput on the TC's NAS via Gigabit Ethernet was 81.2 Mb/s, which translates into 10.15 MB/s. Those are around the same numbers you could expect from a USB attached HDD on the AEBS. I am unsure if that speed is sufficient, but just so you know, you will never get speeds as high as an HDD connected directly to a computer being shared over the network unfortunately.

Really?

I may have forgotten to consider that the HDD attached to the AEBS uses USB, thus speeds of 70MB/s or even 40MB/s are quite high.
USB only offers 25-30MB/s, so that will be the maximum speed anyway, regardless of what the Gigabit Ethernet offers (unless it offers less of course).

 

[flopticalcube]

I was never able to get more than 10MB/s out of my Airdisk. I think its the wimpy CPU that they have in the TC/AEBS that causes the numbers to be so low. Its not really an issue for backup but if you are moving movie files around, then its a bit of a pain.

 

[itickings]

Unfortunately, flopticalcube's numbers are the realistic ones here. As with most other cheap NAS devices, the processing power just isn't there to saturate gigabit ethernet or even the USB2 interface.

Using a "full computer"-based NAS will give much better speeds.

 

[nashmills]

Thanks for all the replies.

I think I will hold off getting one for now and continue with my external hdd plugged directly into my pc. It seems I would have similar, although not quite as bad, problems as I had with the gigabit router's usb port.