AirDisk vs. Networked drive very slow

hi everyone,
have been searching and browsing the forum around this topic but couldn't find a real answer or fix to my "problem" yet.
i'm just really curious about why an external drive hooked up to the airport extreme is about 10 times slower than a harddrive shared from another mac using wifi through the same base station.
setup is as follows:
LaCie BigDisk Extreme shared through a G4 Cube (love) > Ethernet Hub > Airport Extreme (Gigabit Ethernet) versus WD MyBook Premium II > USB 2.0 > Airport Extreme (Gigabit Ethernet)
i'm accessing both from a macbook (black one, latest model) and a macbook pro (latest model) - and transferring a file from the disk hooked up to the cube is about 10 times faster than the same file (or any other comparable in size) copied from the drive hooked up to the airport extreme basestation.
it does not make ANY difference at all if i set the basestation to any of the 4 options you find in the wireless radio mode options (802.11n 2.4/5GHz - b/g compatible), so i'm really curious if this is just a firmware issue (7.2.1) that will get fixed further down the road or if i'm doing something really stupid, or... if this is a half-baked feature never to be living up to the promise made?
anyone? any ideas?
thanks,
norbert

A Western Digital My Book Live. I've spent two days trading emails with a very nice person from the company who has asked me to try various fixes and nothing has worked. They are perplexed as to a solution and I'm close to pulling the plug on this endeavor.
I have an imac connected to a switch with the my book live and the imac connected to the switch. Switch connected to the wall ethernet jack that connects to the time capsule/airport device. The time capsule is connected to the verizon fios router/modem. I have the verizon wireless signal turned off. Everything else in the house has connected and has been working fine for a year. This network hard drive takes forever to access and is very slow.

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