Can multiple devices access drives connected to Airport extreme at the same time?

i have a few days to decide before someone gets me either an airport extreme or a decent NAS adapater to using with my existing airport express, from the US. my airport express serves me good for all my networking needs but i have decided to take my portable media wireless.
i wanna know which will be the best option? to plug in the portable hdds to an a.extreme via a usb hub and share it across devices or to do the same with a nas adapter using my existing current generation a.express?
i got ios, android, mac and windows devices on my network. and an apple tv.
please share ur thoughts.
Neerav

Express is slow ethernet.. 10/100 only. The max speed of any connection to a USB hard disk is limited severely by the 100mbit..
USB is always slow btw.. This is actually a poor way to share a drive. A cheap NAS.. ie ethernet to Sata directly is far far superior and a single disk NAS can be had cheaply.. you will never get close with USB in network situations.
If you use a hub though, you can plug multiple disks into an Extreme.. I guess the network speed is at least no worse than the USB hub -- ethernet devices which are lousy as a whole.
Never forget you have the fastest ethernet adapters and fastest possible connectors already on computers on the network.. people are so utterly mesmerized by NAS they forget.. a FW800 or better USB3 if you have a newer computer shared to the network from a computer has much higher throughput and is much cheaper than even the very low end network stand alone boxes.

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I have airport extreme 802.11n gigabite connected to a usb hub and a hard disk connected to the usb hub.. The disk is a usb disk drive the disk doen't show on the desk top and disk utility doesn't show them
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I attached a USB self powered hub to my airport extreme and attached to it my printer and 1 terabyte external drive.
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1. Open AirPort Utility (Applications-->Utilities)
2. Select your base station from the list on the left.
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4. Click the blue icon labeled "Disks" at the top of the utility screen.
5. Make sure your disk shows up, click "File Sharing".
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...Called it a roaming network. Wireless mode is create a wireless network. I have checked allow this network to be extended. Probably need to uncheck that?
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The other important settings for a roaming network are:
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Each router must broadcast a wireless network with an identical Network Name. For the Linksys, Network Name is the same as its SSID.
Each router wireless network must use the same Wireless Security type and password. The Linksys WRT-54G is capable of up to WPA2 Personal. If you have it set to this level of security, the AirPort should be at the same setting.
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I donot have a Mac and I use windows laptop.

For your iPad, you will need an app, like FileBrowser, to access the external drive.
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Click on the AirPort Extreme icon
Click Edit in the smaller window that appears
Click the Network tab at the top of the next window
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This is probably the most sensible post I've read on the issue. I've spent the last 2 days trying to get my 500GB LaCie Quadra hard drive to work with my Airport Extreme (the square one, yes .
I've formatted it correctly with the Disk Utility (multiple times!).
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Seems like its just too flaky to use an external disk connected to the Airport Extreme.
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Hello,
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Good luck everyone who struggles with this.
David

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Hi
I've been backing up to a USB drive connected to Airport Extreme since I installed Leopard with no problem.. Since 10.5.6 it stopped working. I ended up erasing the drive, reformatting it, reseting the Airport Extreme, repair permissions, used Onyx and Applejack and still this is what I'm getting:
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defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
see if the airdisk shows up as a possible TM disk after that.

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$2500 for a computer that can't connect to a network drive that can be seen by an $500 Dell laptop?
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Put that same FAT32 box on an AirPort Express, and my Mac is BLIND. It can't see the drive.

HT204057 Time machine back up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme.

Why did Apple stop supporting time machine back-up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme? It worked very well.

Why did Apple stop supporting time machine back-up via USB hard drive connected to Airport Extreme?
Time Machine backups are supported via USB hard drive connected to the AirPort Extreme"ac" version.
Time Machine backups were not supported via USB hard drive connected to earlier versions of the AirPort Extreme.
Some users who tried this on earlier version AirPort Extremes seemed to have some success with Time Machine backups....some had moderate success and some had no success with this. Count me in the "no success" category.
See the topic about Time Machine support for USB disks in this Apple Support document:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5924?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

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Is there a hack to get it to play on multiple airports, like giving both airports the same identity or something?
I could acheive this with extra speakers and lots of wires running all over the house, but I'd like to avoid that.

From the Airport Express FAQ
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108038#9
Question: Can iTunes send a single AirTunes stream to multiple AirPort Express stations?
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HI
Here is my dilemma, my daughter dropped my wifes iphone in the bath and it will now only power up when plugged into the mains. When plugged in it cannott find the sim and according to the local apple store the wifi antenna is also broken.
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How, exactly, would you propose connecting it to both an AC power adapter and your computer when it has only one dock connector? If you don't want to set it on fire, I wouldn't try.
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Can multiple devices access drives connected to Airport extreme at the same time?

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