Extreme switches off when updating podcasts (too much data?) - the saga

Question

Issue:
When refreshing podcasts the extreme can actually switch off, the status light on the extreme will switch off and it will not appear in the airport status menu. to recover I have to power cycle the extreme. There is no difference if I download only one podcast or allow for simultaneous downloads at a time. After about 1 or 2 times the extreme will just switch off.
Under this same configuration, my iTunes library has no issue playing back any of the content only podcast refreshing causes the Extreme to shutdown after the specified time.
Configuration:
Three disks connected to the airport extreme using an unpowered hub by technika. All three disks are powered through their own power supplies and are formatted in HFS+ Extended (Journaled)
You can find a youtube review of the hub here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fihYOsQ1SQ8
iMac running Mac OS X 10.6.5 and all the latest updates. Disk Utility already run on the internal Macintosh HD and there are no errors to report.
Mac is connected wirelessly to the extreme's wifi network using 802.11a (I have yet to get it to connect using 802.11g.
Workarounds:
Despite the two other disks not being accessed by the mac, as a workaround I conducted two isolation steps.
I removed the other two disks from the hub while keeping the one disk with my iTunes Library connected through the hub, selected podcasts from the left hand side of iTunes and clicked refresh on the lower right corner of the iTunes window to get the latest podcasts to download.
-With the one disk connected to the hub, music playing back and podcasts downloading everything seems fine.
-I am now wondering if it's the hub or a limitation of the extreme or if it's because I am connected using 802.11a.
-Although I didn't finish downloading all the podcasts, I paused all intentionally and switched my mac to 802.11g successfully by changing the radio mode on the extreme to 802.11n only (5GHz) - 802.11b/g
-relaunched iTunes
-refreshed podcasts again
-The podcasts all stopped due to an error (sorry for not noting it)
-connected to hard drive directly to the extreme and restarted the extreme for good measure
-airport extreme not visible by mac wirelessly, reset extreme by pressing the button on back of extreme, which didn't do anything for some reason, power-cycled extreme.
-Launched iTunes and refreshed iTunes Library
-I noticed a few things, podcasts stop downloading due to err= -3150 or -3259
-more spinning beach balls in uTunes than usual (disk and network activity are the likely causes.)
-This setup seems flaky at best. Apple does not document this so I don't believe it's directly supported but it would be nice but I can see a lot of caveats beyond what I described.
I don't know if this helps anyone who is trying to do the same but I would say this should be avoided as I don't think the firmware on the extreme can support this, iTunes 10.1 doesn't seem to work well with this setup as there are errors when downloading and it gets a bit sluggish with iTunes experiencing so many disk and network activity issues (beach balls)
Moral of the story, I will go back to connecting my iTunes library disk directly to my mac unless someone has some clever solution or suggestion.
Here are the setting as per Airport Utility in Manual Setup
Airport Icon>Summary
Version 7.4.2
Wireless Mode: Create a Wireless Network
Wireless Security: WPA2 Personal
Internet Icon>Internet Connection
Connection Sharing: Off (Bridge Mode)
Disks Icon>Disks
3 hard drives connected.
Tried with iTunes Library Disk alone connected through the USB hub and directly into the Airport Extreme in an effort to isolate the issue.
Disk Icon>File Sharing
Enable File Sharing - on
Secure Shared Disks: With Airport Extreme password
Airport Disk Guest Access: Not allowed

Answer 1

Hi... mine crashes too, but it has to do with erasing a large amount of files.
I got my airport extreme the other day, very excited to be able to plug my 500 gb drive into it so my wife and I can back up our machines using wireless (time machine). I had already had a years worth of backup on the hard drive, and didn't realize that over the base station the way its backed up is different from when the HD is just hooked directly to the computer.
So, well... took forever to do a fresh back up, and then I went to erase my old time machine folder on my drive and every time I would request the delete over the network... crash the airport. I tried several more times, incl just doing a little folder. I ended up having to plug the drive directly into my machine and erasing it that way (over 700,000 files... so, not sure the Airport is designed to handle all that).
This might explain why the time machine works differently over Airport (and Time Capsule?) as the hardware that Apple uses just isn't up to handling large files. Over Airport it creates a disk image which it writes to, somehow, rather than directly writing a large amount of files to the drive. Seems like a work engineering work around to me, otherwise why change the method?
Cheers.