Anyone using a hub/multiple devices on Airport Extreme?

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I just got an Airport Extreme and I'm really curious about how far the USB connection on the router can be pushed. Has anyone had success or problems with attaching a multi-port powered hub to the USB connection? I'm thinking if it would work, why not share a printer and a external HDD or two with other PCs on my home network?
 
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drgrafix
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Can't believe nobody is using that USB connection. Bueller? Anyone?

EDIT: Just found out that AEBS does NOT support USB drives formatted in NTFS. The USB drive must be formatted in Fat16, Fat32, or something called HFS+. In my case, I do have a few files bigger than the Fat32 limit (some classic DVDs) on the HDD, which was formatted with NTFS. I need access from both the Windows machine and the Mac, so for the time being, I will try sharing that drive when connected to the XP machine. The other alternative is to dump the files over to another drive(s) and reformat... maybe using this HFS+?
 
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I have an Airport Extreme Base Station, and I have a USB hub hooked to it. Currently I have an HP laser printer, 1 terabyte external drive, and 1 320 gig drive plugged into the hub. They all run beautifully. The only thing I had a problem with is a 160 gig portable drive that I plugged into the hub, it didn't like it so much as my drives kept disconnecting. As soon as I pulled the portable drive out everything worked fine.

Also I share the drives with my Windows PC, it has no problem reading or writing to them even though they are formatted with HFS+. Just make sure you have the Airport Utility software installed on your pc and you won't have any problems.
 

EdH


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I have an Epson printer and 300Gb external hdd plugged into a usb port, attached to an Air Port Extreme. No problems here, at least with Macs. Haven't tried with any windows machines yet.
 
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I have just set this up on my home network. Have only one 750GB LaCie desktop USB drive connected via powered hub, and have also connected another desktop FAT32 drive same way. LaCie is partitioned, half in HFS+ for time machine backups for two Mac laptops, the other half in FAT32 for general storage and iTunes library (all files in Apple lossless format).

But have two problems with the AP extreme when trying the following:
1. Laptop connected by wireless to the AP extreme, listening to my iTunes library on the laptop. Occasional periods of silence where music cuts out. Seems to be either the wireless signal being interrupted, or HD data transfer. Annoying, and should be corrected when I get my Sonos and connect by ethernet cable. I have to think that if the AP extreme is good for HD video streaming it could also stream my music in lossless format without interruption.
2. Related to #1, doing what I describe in #1 while loading CD's into my iTunes library, data is transferred by wireless, not hardwired to router. It works for a short time, then the drive gets disconnected. I can only reestablish the connection to the drive by shutting down the computer and rebooting, even need to reboot the AP extreme as it will recognize the drive (after laptop reboot) but can not mount it.

Router is located on first floor of my small house, near a TV with wireless Roku but these are OFF when this happens, and no other data-intensive activity is taking place on the network. At worst the other mac laptop is web surfing. AP extreme is configured using the default apple settings.

Comments appreciated.
 

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