Cannot connect Windows 7 laptop to USB HDD attached to Airport Extreme

Question

I would appreciate anyone's help regarding the following issue. The situation is as follows:
Laptop with Windows 7 installed
Laptop connects to Airport Extreme (5th generation) through Wifi
An external HDD (WD Elements 1TB) is attached to the Airport Extreme's USB
The external HDD is visible in Airport Utility and should work fine, as far as the Airport Utility is concerned
The external HDD is also visible in Windows Explorer and works fine when I attach it directly to the laptop's USB
However, I cannot access the HDD from my laptop when it's connected to the Airport Extreme's USB
I've followed all the steps described in http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1331 for mapping a network drive, so I've done the following:
I opened "Map Network Drive"
I selected an unused drive letter
I checked the Airport Extreme for the correct IP address (in my case: 10.0.1.1) and the HDD for its correct name (in my case called: "Backup")
I entered the correct path to the drive, using the above IP address and HDD's name
After doing all this, I keep receiving the following error message: "Windows cannot access \\10.0.1.1\Backup. Check the spelling of the name. Otherwise, there might be a problem with your network. To try and identify and resolve network problems, click Diagnose."
Details of the error message are as follows: "Error code: 0x80070035. The network path was not found."
When I select "Diagnose", Windows indicates that the external device or the external source does not accept the connection.
Access to the Airport Extreme is password protected. Same for the HDD. However, Windows does not prompt me to give the username and password, which might be causing the problem.
Does anyone have any idea how to solve this?
Thanks,
Paul

Answer 1

If you are connected by wireless.. it is actually wireless that is the problem.
30MB file (please try and use b for bits and B for Bytes.. )
that works out around 300Mb (with overheads).
That is 60Mbit/s average speed.. and for wireless I would say that is pretty good. (Real world transfer speed you can expect 1/2-1/4 of link speed.. and tending to the lower end of that. )
Plug the computer in by ethernet and get a speed for transfer of a single large file.. try something of the 1GB sort of size. A movie file for instance works fine.
Ethernet should be faster than any other step in the process.. assuming gigabit of course.. and that will then give you the upper limit speed.. but I would expect around 10MB/s max speed and maybe a bit less than that. USB on a router is choked because it is processor intensive. Most routers only manage that speed and sometimes a lot less.
Wireless on 5ghz band is faster than 2.4ghz if you are up close. It is worthwhile forcing the 5ghz connection if you want better wireless speed.