Airport Extreme Updated With Gigabit Ethernet

[EagerDragon]

Woot, about fricking time. Should have been there from the begining.

Hmmm, your family really really needed Gigabit to transfer huge files between their machines? Or was it their greater-than-100Mbit internet connection? Or maybe, it was your inner-geekiness that's hooked on specs more than functionality that made you go with a much-harder-to-maintain router from another company?

The Man wants it, that is all it matters. Not nice to attack.

Blimey, I'd forgotten how expensive it is. £120! That's double to triple the price of most other gigabit base stations out there in the UK.

And most of these include ADSL modems (the most common internet connection in the UK), which the AEBS doesn't. Means I'd have to keep my old wireless router modem plugged in for the ADSL modem part. Bit of a shame.

Stamping that Apple logo is very expensive, thats the difference

 

[Westside guy]

Does a gigabit network require different cables? I'm not sure of the differences between cat5, cat5e, and cat6 cables. Will a gigabit port work just as well with any type, or would it require replacing exisiting cables?

I don't imagine there's an issue nowadays, but I remember when gigabit first came about there was sometimes an problem because 100base-T only required the use of four of the wires, while gigabit requires all eight - so sometimes cat 5 cable wouldn't be "plumbed" correctly for gigabit.

 

[Black Belt]

...
If only Apple would properly stealth the Extreme and ping bucket. Oh and some SPI would be nice.

It doesn't do this????? No Stateful Inspection??? Cripe! Not that you can tell anything from the dumbed-down Apple page. I dug around in the support and it appears to be the sad truth.

And while the USB to connect to printers is nice, I would prefer an eSata connection for network drives. USB & Harddrives have been really unreliable in my experience.

 

[Westside guy]

And while the USB to connect to printers is nice, I would prefer an eSata connection for network drives. USB & Harddrives have been really unreliable in my experience.

I've never had a problem with USB hard drives.

I share your preference for eSATA; but from a marketing standpoint USB makes a lot more sense because 1) the target audience knows about USB, but probably not SATA; and especially 2) there are a lot more external USB drives than eSATA drives out there right now (and the consumer eSATA drives probably also have USB 2 connectors as well).

 

[Black Belt]

Oh you're lucky. USB has a problem with voltage management. I have had multiple hardrives and many USB keys and a Palm charger get fried (on various machines). I just don't trust it anymore. I only use voltage regulated hubs and even then it may or may not recognize a hard drive. It's annoying!

Apple always wants to be on the cutting edge, so eSata would be an obvious choice. They frequently put such features on their hardware - for example they used firewire when it was relatively unknown and they were always on the edge with their floppy disk drives and optical drives.

 

[THX1139]

Okay, so after reading this thread, I think for now the average user doesn't need to upgrade unless they have a network of Macs and need to transfer large files. Correct? I don't forsee in the next few years of having more than my laptop and desktop in a network. Usually, if I have to transfer large files, I just firewire them. Although... I was thinking of hooking a shared disk into the USB port on the AEBS for a shared area for music and other files. This would be an area that I would make accessable to my roommate or friends that stop by with laptops. I just wish the port on the AEBS was firewire instead of USB.

So, anyway... I bought my AEBS about 3 weeks ago and I could probably return it and pay the restocking fee. I just don't know if it's worth having the down time and paying the fee to get a feature that I may not use. I think the benefits are clear for situations where there is a network of computers, like in a design studio, that need to share large files. I'm not so sure that's needed for situations like mine, where I work alone and all my stuff is in my office. Heck, I don't even need wireless except for those times a client needs access or I want to sit in the living room with my laptop. What would you do in my situation? Keep the current AEBS or trade it in for the new one?

 

[KT322]

If anyone has a new AirPort Extreme, what transfer rates do you get when sending/receiving large files between a gigabit capable Mac connected to the AEBS and a Mac wirelessly connected to the AEBS via 802.11n?

When testing this make sure AirPort is off on the wired Mac, with the wireless Mac > 15 feet from the AEBS.

With the non-gigabit AEBS I'm getting 10.5 - 11 MBytes/sec (84 - 88 Mbits/sec).

 

[md63]

The benefit of the upgraded AEBS really depends on your network specifics. I just tested my network by transferring a 2GB file from my MBP to an NAS server which has gigabit ports on gigabit switch. My AEBS is the OLD version with fast ethernet ports which serves the rest of my network. The following are my results. As you can see I don't get 10 times the benefit of a fast ethernet connection because it appears my NAS is slowing the transfer on the gigabit ethernet. I do get benefit of using 802.11n over 802.11g since the former is 3.6x faster than the basic g transfer. The gigabit ethernet transfer is only 4.5x faster than the 802.11g speed. An upgraded AEBS in my network could not be any faster than the gigabit ethernet speed and may be slower since the 802.11n may be slowing down the transfer. I believe a computer to computer transfer would see faster speeds on a pure gigabit network.

Gigabit ethernet - 82Mb/s (4.5x G) Hardwired transfer
AEBS N (5Ghz) - 64Mb/s (3.6x G) Wireless through AEBS fast ethernet
Wireless G - 18Mb/s Wireless through 802.11g router

 

[SiliconAddict]

Well, back when they released the N-specced AE, I wasn't seeing N-spec AP's with gigabit ethernet from other manufacturers either. They all shipped with 100MB ethernet.

And yet Apple had this in prior AE's. Just because no one else is doing it doesn't mean Apple should cut a feature that IS standard in all of its hardware. How long as Apple had Gigabit in their laptops?

 

[SiliconAddict]

I've never had a problem with USB hard drives.

I share your preference for eSATA; but from a marketing standpoint USB makes a lot more sense because 1) the target audience knows about USB, but probably not SATA; and especially 2) there are a lot more external USB drives than eSATA drives out there right now (and the consumer eSATA drives probably also have USB 2 connectors as well).

Once you go FW800...well its like going back to dial up after tasting cable. USB is horrid for external storage. Fine for moderate bandwidth devices like flash drives, printers, scanners, optical drives, mice, joysticks, etc. But storage? No. Never again. eSATA need to hit the market hard and now. USB simply is not up to the task of dealing with 200GB+ drives.

I love my FW800 -> SATA 2.5" external cage. The speed is god like.

 

[Westside guy]

Once you go FW800...well its like going back to dial up after tasting cable. USB is horrid for external storage. Fine for moderate bandwidth devices like flash drives, printers, scanners, optical drives, mice, joysticks, etc. But storage? No. Never again. eSATA need to hit the market hard and now. USB simply is not up to the task of dealing with 200GB+ drives.

I love my FW800 -> SATA 2.5" external cage. The speed is god like.

SATA II is almost 4x the speed of FW800. That's why I bought an Expresscard34 SATA II adapter. I should really benchmark it to see if I'm getting all that speed, but it seems bloody fast.

But really, since the big drive I bought is mainly for backups, I don't have a problem using the USB connection most of the time since my normal backups are incremental and thus rather small. But for that first big backup (70G), having SATA was very nice. It'll be great for the occasional iMovie project as well.

What I really wish, though, was that either a) the MBP had a built-in eSATA port; or b) I could find a single-port low-profile eSATA card for ExpressCard34. All the adapters I've seen have 2 (or more) ports, and have this big clunky end hanging off the side of my laptop.

 

[maestrokev]

Why can't they add a FW400/800 port to the AEBS in addition to the USB and Gigabit?

I have two 1TB external drives and every bit of speed helps when accessing on my internal network.

I don't think it's crazy for the home user to require Gigabit or faster on the AEBS. Think of Steve's promotion of iMovie and HD Video in the presentation. I think people will start shooting RAW camera files and HD video more if they had a better way to access it.

Having external HD's plugged into the AEBS is a better solution than trying to store all your files on internal HD's. USB waaaaay too slow!

 

[gramarye]

:/

"ComputerWiz decided to break open both the gigabit and non-gigabit editions of the AirPort Extreme, and unfortunately for those hoping that their older iteration could be upgraded with a simple firmware patch, that doesn't look to be the case."

The final answer:
http://www.computerwiz.com/?p=80\

i'm sad...oh well. this always happen to me. never buy apple products around Christmas season. (They only update to iLife '07, intel, hardware, processor... the next month)