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sandman512

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 25, 2011
93
0
Looking for some extra storage and ideally would like to have a shared network Hard Drive. What kind of USB hard drive would I need to connect to my Airport Extreme? Thanks!
 
Quick question, will a USB 3.0 work? Need to pick one up today.
Thanks!

I do not think that the USB port on the Extreme is USB 3.0, so you probably won't see the full USB 3.0 transfer speed. However they are backwards compatible so the drive should run just fine at 2.0 speeds.
 
Thanks for the reply. Picked up a 1TB Western Digital. Just a FYI for anyone out there, it has to be a FAT32 format in order to work.
 
Thanks for the reply. Picked up a 1TB Western Digital. Just a FYI for anyone out there, it has to be a FAT32 format in order to work.

Several formats can be used with AirPort, FAT32 is one of them and that's the format most 1TB drives would come out of the box with. However any hard drive can be easily reformatted to a different file system if the default one isn't what you need.
 
Thanks for the reply. When I bought the drive, I formatted it under Windows 7, I think it was NTFS? The drive was not detected on my network? After finding a program that can format it to FAT32, I hooked it up and was discovered immediately. If need be, I will try another format. Once again, thank you.

Just found this: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2426
 
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However any hard drive can be easily reformatted to a different file system if the default one isn't what you need.

I guess "easily" may have been an overstatement on my part :/ I just did some googling on formatting FAT32 under Win7, I see that it's not as easy as it is with OS X. 3rd party utility seems the simplest solution, there's a command-line method apparently but it looks like it takes a LONG time to format.
 
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