Airport extreme write to USB hard drive - slow!?

[iwannamac]

Admittedly new to the world of wireless networking. Have my 1TB LaCie USB hard drive plugged into my AirPort Extreme. I had high hopes of keeping my iPhoto and iTunes libraries on this hard drive for access downstairs with my MacBook. Got it all setup tonight, and attempted to put a 1.5GB file from my MacBook on the hard drive. According to Finder it was going to take 8 hours to complete the transfer! Does this sound right? I realize USB is slow, but I didn't think that slow. The Belkin-N300 router I had before was faster than this on the USB sharing side.

 

[iwannamac]

Update: Hard drive must have been initializing or something...I tried the same file again about 10 minutes later, and this time was able to transfer 1.5GB to the USB drive in under 5 minutes. Much better!

 

[iwannamac]

Interesting. Seems to be very inconsistent. Sometimes takes 5 minutes, sometimes takes 6 hours (indicated) for the same file. Turned the hard drive off and on again, and seems to be working fine now (fast), so I guess the problem is in the hard drive itself.

 

[benchley]

Same problem

Were you ever able to get this working fast? I have an airport extreme with a 1TB LaClia drive, and want to do the same iPhoto, iTunes sharing. It is impossible to use, and now I am thinking about trying to go firewire direct to the drive and have one of my macs as a file server. Tx