Drive connected to Airport Extreme has very slow transfer rantes

Good Afternoon. I thought I would post here to see if anyone has had an similar issues - or hopefully solutions. I have a 2TB external hard drive which I have connected to my Airport Extreme (fairly new router - but not the newest that handles ac protocol) I can see the drive fine booted either from the mac or the bootcamp side. The only issue is that more often than not there is a serious time lag just to see or transfer files. Since apple touts this as a feature of the airport, I'm guessing that I must have something not configured correctly in my settings and was hoping someone could shed some light on the matter. I saw that there was a firmware update that supposedly addressed transfer speeds with external drives but this update was for the newer routers and time capsules. Thanks for any and all help.

Unfortunately these things are inherently laggy. The more backups it has, the longer it takes to mount the volume and sort it all out. Perhaps one day when these things can ship with 2 TB SSDs instead of HDDs, this will get a lot faster.

(EDIT: yes, you actually have a separate drive attached to the Airport, but this still applies. If anything, you may be somewhat laggier due to speed limitations in transferring data on the USB port, vs a Time Capsule with the drive built in).