Question about hooking up my external HDD

[smurray]

I have a Mac mini that is hooked up to my TV in my living room. I use it as a HTPC and have all my media on an external HDD hooked directly to the mini via USB. I also have a Airport Extreme that the mini is plugged into which provides wifi for the rest of my devices. I know it is possible to hook a usb HDD directly into the Airport Extreme to share the drive with my whole network but I'm wondering if there would be any advantage to doing that as opposed to simply sharing the drive through my Mac mini (which is how I do it now). I share the drive so my Macbook can access the media stored on it but I'd say about 80%-90% of the time it's the Mac mini that's using it. So if I were to take a performance hit by hooking it up to the router then it probably wouldn't be worth it. Any thoughts?

 

[ColdCase]

The mac mini connection would be more reliable. If you can keep it on when anyone wants access, thats the thing to do, no need to change. The AE is not really built for heavy duty hard drive share use, its USB port is more for sharing a printer.