WD My Book

[kamathi]

I just purchased a WD My Book 1.5TB network drive I have plugged into an ethernet port on my Airport Extreme. Would I have been better off regarding drive speed/performance to have bought a USB 2.0 drive and plugged it into the USB port on the AE?

Also, the drive shows up in the finder immediately on both Leopard and Snow Leopard Macbooks. However, I am unable to mount drive and change anything, i.e. name, add authorized users, etc. I also can't find IP address of drive to potentially mount through IP interface? Any thoughts?

 

[Makosuke]

As for the performance, though I've never compared the two side by side my experience hooking a USB MyBook drive to an AEBS makes me think the route you went will be faster and probably more stable as well. I admit I was pushing the USB-attached drive pretty hard by attempting to use it, partitioned, as a Time Machine volume, but the raw data throughput was relatively low (MUCH slower than a wired ethernet connection, and also drastically lower than the throughput on the drive) and I was having partition corruption issues. I place the blame on the AEBS's CPU (or firmware) just not having enough horsepower to serve that much data without becoming the bottleneck itself.

Assuming that whatever NAS hardware is in the network MyBook drives is either more powerful or better tuned than what's in the AEBS, it should work quite a bit better. Assuming it's Gigabit rather than 100BT, then if it has an internal transfer rate faster than USB2 it might even be faster in terms of raw throughput than a hard-wired USB2 drive.

As for the other problems you're having, hopefully someone else will be able to help.