"Dome" Airport Extreme and External Hard Drives?

I know the new Airport Extreme bases are shipped with the Airport Disk (not sure of proper name) utility to hook an external hard drive to the USB.

Can that same software be applied to the older "dome" base stations? Is there any work around, 3rd party etc. etc.?

Thanks in advance

The older airports don't have the USB port to hook up a hard drive so there is no way it would work

the base station that i have has a USB, i can print with my usb printer through it.

Woops forgot about the USB in the extreme versions. There are no add-ons and the speed would not be viable for any such use

you could hook up a Network Drive via the ethernet port on the Extreme Base -- that requires a NAS drive , and you'd lose the ability to hook a computer to the Base via ethernet. NAS enclosures are relatively cheap ($50 or so). I'm looking at doing this since I access via wireless with all the home computers anyway. You could put a 400 meg hardrive on your network for about $200-250, accessible by all the machines on your network.

I'm told, however, that speed is a bit slow in this configuration (for disk backup purposes) -- apparently basic file sharing and iTunes sharing is fine.

then I wouldn't need any special software or anything on the mac side, like the Aiport Disk that comes with the new extremes?

Don't think so -- a NAS drive is configured to be recognized via an ethernet connection. The Airport Extreme Base (older version, not the new one) just sees it as a piece of network hardware (like a modem or router).