Airport Extreme with USB harddrive - veeeery slow. Any help?

Hi everybody
After a couple years with an Airport Express I upgraded to a brandnew Airport Extreme last week. The one feature I was most looking forward to was to connect an external USB-disk to the basestation, and having wireless access to it from all our computers (all macs).
I connected my 1TB Lacie disk to the AE (USB 2.0), it mounts just fine, and everything looks great – until I try to move a file to or from the disk. A 800mb file takes between 15 and 20 minutes to copy?! If I connect the drive directly to my MacBook Pro, the same transfer takes about 1 minute. Nothing wrong with the disk, or the cable.
I was hoping to use the disk for Time Machine backups (amongst other things), which Apple's product-info lists as a feature, and to have access to movies and music from anywhere in the apartment: But at those transfer speeds, the AirDrive-option seems rather useless, and I feel kinda cheated. Is there anything I can do? Why is the transfer rate so low? Is that really as good as it gets?
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.
Hans

Another "me too" post I'm afraid, but the difference for me is that it used to work just fine - sustained 7-10MB/sec
The problem has only started in the last few months. The main use for me is updating Aperture Vaults and they started taking a ridiculous time - even for small updates. As Aperture has recently been updated I thought that was the root of the problem, but then I tried copying a bunch of files in Finder and exactly the same - initial burst that peaked at 7.5MB/sec then dropped to a steady 40-50kB/sec!!!
So, I'd eliminated Aperture as the cause so started diagnosing other potential problems. Mountain Lion has recently been updated, but copying to a Linux box (using AFP) still works fine.
Then I recalled that I'd recently updated the firmware on the AEBS so I downgraded to the previous version - no joy.
I've got a total of 3 disks, three different makes, two of which have been connected for a couple of years. The third is new, freshly formatted HFS+. I've tried connecting them directly rather than through a (powered) hub; tried different cables; tried connecting my MBP using Gigabit Ethernet rather than W-Fi. Nothing makes any difference.
Googling the problem returned plenty of hits (many from these forums) but they all date from 2007-2011 - this thread is the only one I found post-2011 - so my assumption was that it was an old problem that had long since been fixed, and that seemed to be the case as it's worked fine for me up until recently.
The only thing I can assume is that it's something in 10.8.4 as that is the only other thing that's changed recently, but why should that only affect USB disks on an AEBS? Doesn't make sense, but you can't downgrade to 10.8.3 to test the theory.
Sorry I can't be any more help, but I thought it worth posting my experience in case it gives any clues.
Oh, BTW, mine is an older (3rd generation) AEBS. The latest ones are 5th generation.

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