Time Machine on Airport Extreme problems... Time Capsule?

[jpolk]

Hi all. Here's the deal. I have an Airport Extreme and and external 1 TB hard drive. When I first set up Time Machine on this set up a few years ago (partitioning the hard drive first) it worked great! After a few firmware "improvements" from Apple it no longer works. The computers cannot attach to the external drive via the Airport and when I force them to the Time Machine backups fail after about 15 minutes of backing up.

I'm considering buying a 1TB Time Capsule for our main router and my wife's MacBook backup (I'll just hard wire the old drive to my iMac) and using the older Airport as a WiFi repeater.

Problem is that I've read about all sorts of problems with the Time Capsules failing after about 18 months. So should I try the set up I'm considering or is there a fix for my current setup that I should try instead?

 

[Cougarcat]

Not to dredge up an old topic, but I'm thinking of getting an Airport Extreme to go along with my Lacie drive. I have plenty of storage, so Time Capsule would be overkill. I knew once upon a time it was possible to use Time Machine with an AE; is it still possible, or did Apple kill it with the latest firmware?

And I would be backing up two Macs, my iMac and Macbook, to the same partition. That will work, right?