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Best wireless storage solution

sarah3585

sarah3585

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 12, 2007
237
0
Hi,

This is a subject that confuses me a little so I would be very grateful for some advise.

I have my eye on the Western Digital 1TB My Book World Edition (£95) and the Buffalo Linkstation 1TB (£90.) As far as I can see they offer the same things. I would connect these up to my standard router from O2.

Alternatively is there a bigger benefit from buying and airport extreme and connecting this to an external hard drive or getting timecapsle? Rather than using my standard router?

Thanks
 
If you can do that with your current router, then go ahead. I don't see the point of spending hundreds on new router/TC if the old one can do the same. Just make sure it has wireless N
 
This is where my lack of knowledge shows...

My current router creates a 2.4Ghz G network. Do I need it to be a wireless N?
 
sarah3585 said:
This is where my lack of knowledge shows...

My current router creates a 2.4Ghz G network. Do I need it to be a wireless N?
Click to expand...

Well, it doesn't have to be, but wireless G is much slower (I think around 2-3MB/s in real world). Wireless N provides around 10MB/s in real world so for storage, you want more speed or it will be slow to transfer or stream files.

AirPort Extreme is one options but there are other routers that do the same but cost less.
 
So why buy a network drive in the first place, what is it that stops people using a standard router and attaching a standard external HD to it? Why can you do that with Airport Extreme?

Sorry again for being so stupid on the subject
 
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Unfortunately upgrading to wireless-N is not a guaranteed path to significantly faster file transfers. First, if you have mixed generation devices on the same access point, your faster N devices will be slowed down to G/B speeds or worse. Second, don't expect to get anywhere near the advertised speeds. The best N AP's can currently only average about 40Mbps sustained throughput (that's Megabits, not MegaBytes). Most N AP's are only in the mid 20's, while a decent 802.11G AP can do about 12Mbps sustained.

Two of the better N routers available today are the Apple Airport Extreme and the Netgear WNDR3700 - but you'll notice neither of those are the cheapest available either!
 
After years of trying to figure out why Hard Drive access was so slow on the Time Capsule I ended up selling it and putting the proceeds towards an cheap-o Windows notebook ($250@BlackFriday) that I now have placed in my TV media center. I'm surprised at how well this is working.

Attached HDD's are wirelessly mapped to all my local computers and access speeds seem much much faster. That means I can now keep a bulk of the iTunes library on the wireless drive and access videos at a playable speed. And as a bonus I get all the functionality of a computer (unrestricted Hulu, Boxee, Media Center, wireless print etc.). I would prefer to do this with a Mac Mini but Apple charges way too much for such outdated specs.


That said, I'm still looking at the Time Capsule but I'm waiting for the next revision. It's way overdue in both specs and features.
 
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