Read/Write speeds with Airport Extreme and USB Hard Drives

Anybody know how fast the read/write speeds are with a USB hard drive and the Airport Extreme Base Station?
My Setup
I have a 17 MBP (2010) and a 13 MBP (2011) - no SSD's
MBP generally connect via 802.11n 5Ghz with a very strong signal
Gigabit connection on a Windows Desktop
I have a variety of external drives (7200, 5400, Drobo) at varying capacity (320GB, 2TB, 5.6TB)
Goals
Backup: Time machine
Backup: File copies of pictures and home videos (greater than 1GB files)
Backup: Crashplan
File sharing: Aperture libraries--not sure if that is possible or practical. That is something that I need to research further...but on the off chance people have experience with it.
Thanks!

ishjen wrote:
Anybody know how fast the read/write speeds are with a USB hard drive and the Airport Extreme Base Station?
Welcome to Apple's discussion groups.
Apple's AirPort base stations aren't known for fast file serving, but for most purposed they're fast enough.
I can't comment specifically on your Aperture plan, but with some software it's important to avoid simultaneous access by more than one user.

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Help With Airport Extreme and External Hard Drive

I just purchased the Airport Extreme and I couldn't have been happier. I have attached my western digital external hard drive, but I have run into a slight problem/dilemma which I'm hoping someone who is apple savvy can help me out.
I live in a house with a couple of other guys and so I put all of my movies and media onto the hard drive so we can stream it throughout the house, but how do I make sure that someone won't accidently delete the files (The copies on the hard drive are the only ones I have)? I have tried to right click "get info" and change the sharing & permissions properties on the folders that I don't want deleted, but it doesn't save the changes or even allow me to select another option other than Read & Write. I formated the hard drive with the disk utility before I connected it to the AirPort so I know that it has nothing to do with the format of the drive. I also tried to create different user accounts for each roomate so that they could view the files (Read Only) but I get an error message explaining that if I continue, the contents of the hard drive will not be accessible. I'm sure its something simple but I'm obviously missing it.
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Airport Utility under Disks/File Sharing has guest access rights.

Airport Extreme + shared USB hard drive // Mac + PC Access

We are getting ready to purchase an Airport Extreme for our home network. Here's what we are working with:
1) Airport Extreme
2) MacBook
3) MacMini
4) PC
5) TBD USB hard drive that will be connected to AirPort Extreme *for use as shared hard drive*
From the Apple website, regarding the Airport Extreme "Hard Drive Sharing":
+How does it work? Just connect the external hard drive to the USB port on the back of your AirPort Extreme and — voilà — all the documents, videos, photos, and other files on the drive instantly become available to anyone on the secure network, Mac and PC users alike. It’s perfect for file sharing, collaborative projects, and more.+
Can anyone recommend a specific brand and model USB hard drive that they have experience with in this scenario that was/is used as a shared drive that is accessible from both Macs and PCs?
I ask this question because I have a WD external hard drive that did not play nice - it was either PC or Mac, not both.
Thanks

I have 1-4 and a Seagate FreeAgent Desk drive (not an endorsement, just answering your question), and can access the drive from all of 2-4. How you format the drive and/or what files you store on the drive will affect your ability to access/use those files on the drive from Mac/PC. For example, I can't use my iTunes library stored on the drive from the PC, as it's formatted for Mac. Honestly, I never have accessed the drive from my PC until you asked this question, but it worked!

Very slow transfer speeds with Airport Extreme and MacBook

I have been using a new Airport Extreme without problem at my home for the past six weeks. The speed and range was excellent with both my MacBook Pro and the MacBook which I purchased a few weeks ago. I came out to Greece with both laptops and a new AP Extreme box for my home network here. After set up I noticed that internet access was lethargic on the MacBook and file transfer between the two computers was extremely slow. The problem seems to be with the new MacBook (although it was working well in London). I've done some speed tests and the internet download speed is only 48 kpbs! I also notice that the range is very poor--in the room next to the router I am down to five bars. If I connect to the AP Extreme with cable I get the full 1Mbps I would normally expect here in Athens (ADSL nominal 2Mbps). The MacBook Pro has no problems with wireless access speeds or range, so I am assuming this has to be a problem with the AP extreme card in the MacBook. Is there anything I have overlooked? Perhaps something to do with setting up the new AP Extreme here in Athens?

By process of elimination I realised that the only cause of the sudden slowness must be software that I had installed recently. The only software I had added was a wifi utility to detect available networks--open or protected. Unlikely as it sounds, quitting the utility (which I had set to load on startup) made a dramatic improvement in performance.

Slow wifi speeds with airport extreme and win 7

i have an airport extreme router that i love. i recently noticed that my wifi was running slow. after performing a speed check i confirmed that my speeds were about 3-6mb/sec. this was done on my win 7 pro machine. while seated in front of my pc, i ran the same check using my iphone and i get 50mb/sec. this continues to be the case now for like a week. does anyone know if a recent windows update has done something. router has been restored to factory settings to no avail. when i first set up the router a few months ago, both machines were getting 50mb/sec downloads. not sure what has happened. any help would be appreciated.thanks

By process of elimination I realised that the only cause of the sudden slowness must be software that I had installed recently. The only software I had added was a wifi utility to detect available networks--open or protected. Unlikely as it sounds, quitting the utility (which I had set to load on startup) made a dramatic improvement in performance.

[Solved]Variable read/write speed with WD Passport 1 TB external drive

I have this drive connected to my Arch Linux box. Whenever I transfer large files (I use it to backup) the write speed drops from 30M/s to sometimes a few KB/s and then speeds up again ! This drive is connected via an USB 2.0 port with a specific cable which is 2.0 at one end (to connect to my motherboard) and 3.0 at the other end (to connect to the drive). Could this be related to the kernel SES driver which is used (buffer problem maybe)?
This speed problem is that serious that backups take very long and become almost not feasable.
Thanks in advance
Last edited by Strider (2014-02-02 21:00:54)

Jason,
this drive has 3 use cases (my PC is dual boot Arch / Windows Vista) :
1) Backup my PC linux box using a rsync front end (luckybackup) here source and target are ext4 in target always and source is either ext4 or lvm on raid.
2) Backup of my PC Windows Vista using an own written script which uses ntfsclone where source and target are ntfs.
3) Backup of my Windows 7 laptop
The problem is that I have performance issues in scenario's 1 & 2 (but not always) and never in case 3. I think this might finally be hardware related ...
Just before writing this post I connected the drive and it didn't even appear in my file manager (nemo under cinnamon 2.0). So I ran a journalctl and here is the outcome :
Feb 02 09:55:33 Megatron kernel: usb 2-4: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-pci
Feb 02 09:55:33 Megatron kernel: usb 2-4: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
Feb 02 09:55:33 Megatron mtp-probe[911]: checking bus 2, device 4: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-4"
Feb 02 09:55:33 Megatron mtp-probe[911]: bus: 2, device: 4 was not an MTP device
Feb 02 09:55:33 Megatron kernel: usb-storage 2-4:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
Feb 02 09:55:33 Megatron kernel: scsi12 : usb-storage 2-4:1.0
Feb 02 09:55:33 Megatron kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
Feb 02 09:55:34 Megatron kernel: scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD My Passport 07A8 1049 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
Feb 02 09:55:34 Megatron kernel: scsi 12:0:0:1: Enclosure WD SES Device 1049 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
Feb 02 09:55:34 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Spinning up disk...
Feb 02 09:56:04 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: worker [926] /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-4/2-4:1.0/host12/target12:0:0/12:0:0:1 timeout; kill it
Feb 02 09:56:04 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: seq 1876 '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-4/2-4:1.0/host12/target12:0:0/12:0:0:1' killed
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: usb 2-4: reset high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: .ready
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] 1953458176 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Write Protect is off
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Mode Sense: 53 00 10 08
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] No Caching mode page found
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] No Caching mode page found
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sde: sde1 sde2
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: ses 12:0:0:1: Attached Enclosure device
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: worker [926] terminated by signal 9 (Killed)
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] No Caching mode page found
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Assuming drive cache: write through
Feb 02 09:56:06 Megatron kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI disk
Feb 02 09:56:07 Megatron org.gtk.Private.UDisks2VolumeMonitor[592]: ### debug: emit_signal: 0x175a210
Feb 02 09:56:37 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: worker [908] /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-4/2-4:1.0/host12/target12:0:0/12:0:0:0/block/sde/sde1 timeout; kill it
Feb 02 09:56:37 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: seq 1884 '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-4/2-4:1.0/host12/target12:0:0/12:0:0:0/block/sde/sde1' killed
Feb 02 09:56:37 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: worker [928] /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-4/2-4:1.0/host12/target12:0:0/12:0:0:0/block/sde/sde2 timeout; kill it
Feb 02 09:56:37 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: seq 1885 '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.2/usb2/2-4/2-4:1.0/host12/target12:0:0/12:0:0:0/block/sde/sde2' killed
Feb 02 09:56:37 Megatron kernel: usb 2-4: reset high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
Feb 02 09:56:38 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: worker [908] terminated by signal 9 (Killed)
Feb 02 09:56:38 Megatron systemd-udevd[186]: worker [928] terminated by signal 9 (Killed)
Something also worth knowing : the drive is know for being a heavy power drain on the usb 2.0 port (it does not have an external power connection and gets its power only via usb) . So I bought a specific cable with 3.0 at one end and 2 usb 2.0 at the other end : one for transferring data and one for power.

Airport Extreme and USB Hard Disk

I did the following
1. Plugged the Maxtor Basics 3200 into my MacbookPro USB port
2. Formatted it FAT32
3. Unplugged it.
4. Plugged it into AEBS USB port, put around 50g of files on it.
Now, from my MacbookPro I can see the drive, but not the files.
If I plug back into the MacbookPro USB I can see everything.
Any ideas???
I tried with firmware 7.1 and 7.11, no difference

You might make sure that you eject the disk from your MacBook before putting in back in your Airport Extreme.
I had three issues specifically because of not dismounting:
Couldn't write below the root directory if I didn't dismount
Couldn't connect to the drive if the network name changed
Passwords were not accepted when I attempted to remount the drive
I'm using a Maxtor 500GB Personal Storage 3200.
Good luck!
Chris
Message was edited by: MegaJustice

Airport Express and USB Hard drive and extremely slow performance

HI Guys,
I seem to having a lot of trouble with an Airport express and a Lacie 1TB drive. While I have solved several problems by updating firmware and enabling journalling on the Lacie, I am still having problems with extremely slow performance with my macbook, particularly using itunes and Firefox.
Any ideas and any further information needed?
Regards
BJDprivate

BjdPrivate wrote:
HI,
I formatted it using the Lacie setup program for Mac and later enabled it for journalling using Disk utility. This seemed to solve a lot of the recognition problems I was having, however the I-Tunes and firefox performance is still atrocious. If I do Need to completely reformat it using Disk Utility, will I lose my files on the disk now?
not if you move them to a temporary location before you start.
yes, you are better of formatting the drive with DU.

Airport extreme and firewire hard drives

I am gathering from reading here that I will be unable to use my 2 firewire external hard drives with this or have I got that wrong?

there is no way to directly connect any FireWire drives.
I have read several of the posts on this topic, so my original idea to get a firewire-usb hub won't work.
Here is my objective:
1. Centralize files to share between my PowerBook G4 and my Dell laptop so that I don't get mixed up about what system has the most up-to-date files on it.
2. Create consistent backups of the files.
What I have is:
a. Airport Extreme to plug a shared drive into
b. 2 identical USB drives
c. 2 identical firewire drives
Since both my systems are laptops, setting up consistent backups has not been possible - external drives are usually disconnected.
Is there a way to utilize my firewire drives, or do I have to write it off as only sometimes useful as the PB G4 backup drive? There was a mention above to no "direct" way to link - how about indirect?
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PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Airport Extreme Shared USB Hard Drive Performance Issues

I just picked up a new Air Extreme and attached a new Western Digital Passport via USB powered hub (have printer as well). All is working well, however, I am finding performance (especially copying files from my computer to the network HD) to be quite slow. For example, I was trying to copy a 3GB folder with about 1000 files and the copy dialog indicates that it will take about 30 hours. I was able to copy directly to the HD when plugged into computer's USB in a matter of minutes. When I try to download same folder from the net drive to my laptop, it takes about 1 hour. Note: I have Comcast Cable hi-speed so not sure how much is related to this knowing that they do have different download/upload speeds.
I would appreciate any feedback, tips and advice on optimizing performance of my USB drive when shared over the network. Thanks.

How do you have your hard drive formatted? If you are using a Western Digital Passport, you will want to create a separate Mac partition so that you can copy very large files (+4GB). By default, I believe it is FAT32. I had to do this (Mac partition) with my back up drive because I have VMWare Fusion images that easily exceed this.
The new network drive I attached is also a Western Digital, but I didn't reformat it (yet) as I knew I wasn't going to have large files, but I am wondering if maybe I should do this. Unfortunately, then my Windows machines would not be able to read it easily.

Airport Extreme and External Hard Drive. Backup over WAN?

Hi
I'm new to Mac's and just got a macbook air and a airport extreme. I connected my external hard (toshiba) drive to the AE and my computer will recognize it, but when I try to connect to it using Time Machine my external hard drive is not recognized as a device that I can backup to over my WAN. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I would like to be able to backup over the WAN if it is possible. Is it possible to backup using time machine over WAN using an AE and a non apple external hard drive?

Time Machine cannot backup to a hard drive unless it is formatted in Mac OS Extended (Journaled), also known as HFS+.
You have me scratching my head about backing up through the WAN port. Normally, the WAN port would be used for a connection from a modem.....or another router.
However, if you have the AirPort Extreme configured to connect to another router via Ethernet, and the AirPort Extreme is set to operate in Bridge Mode, then you don't have a WAN port, they are all LAN ports, so it would not matter which of the ports that you used.

What is the Read/Write speed for a 250gb Serial ATA hard drive?

Hello. I've been having some problems via my Mac (Kernel panic at start up) and is thinking wether or not it is the hard drive.
Does anyone know what the Write speed is for the specified hard drive. I'm currently getting about 5 mbps and that feels a bit slow
I'm on a Macbook Pro mid 2009 model.
Thanks in advance
Ashley.

I haven't got the logs. I had to reinstall everything in order to get it to start up (Couldn't find ACPI?)
And I'm only asking because it seems like my laptop HD is running slow. Is it normally about 5mbps for a 5400rpm HDD?

Airport Extreme and USB HD not detected in Vista but work in OSX

I have a hard drive and a printer connected to a USB hub that's hooked up to my Airport Extreme. USB hub is a good one, powered. Everything works like it should on the two Macs I have. Airport Utility detects everything fine, all works well. Great.
On my Vista PC, which is my main computer, being by far the most powerful, I have Airport Utility installed so that I can have access to my network hard drive. Weird thing is that it gets detected sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't. When I re-install Airport Utility, everything works for that session. After a reboot it may or may not work. Usually it stops working all together after 2 or 3 reboots.
Internet access works all the time, mind you, as well as printing to my printer that's connected to the extreme. Just no base station detected in Airport Utility and no hard drive access, because the base station isn't available.
Thing to note, my computer goes through a gigabit switch, D-Link DGS-2205 to get to the airport extreme. I have an iMac that also goes through that switch, but doesn't have these problems.
Any ideas what to do? I'm sick of re-installing Airport Utility every couple days.

Nobody had a similar problem? Re-running Airport Utility installer again and Repairing the current installation fixes it for a short period of time, but the same problem comes back after about 3 reboots. Any ideas?

How do I connect airport extreme to seagate hard drive using windows

How do I connect airport extreme to seagate hard drive using windows?

First the AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBS) cannot share out an external HDD attached to its USB port unless it is formatted in either HFS+ or FAT16/32. It will not work if the HDD is formatted in either NTFS or ExFAT.
If the HDD is formatted properly, when you access the AEBS with the AirPort Utility, does the HDD show up properly on the Disks tab of the utility?
If it does, then you would access the HDD as any other network share, using the following format: //servername/sharename. In the case of the AirPort Disk (a HDD attached to the USB port of either an Extreme or Time Capsule), the "servername" would be the Extreme's Base Station Name, and the "sharename" would be the volumename of the HDD.

Using a current Time Capsule with Airport Extreme and Airport Express Older generation

I am looking to achieve a fast local network that allows streaming of music and video. I have bought a Time Capsule to replace the Telstra router (Thomson Router) by linking it using ethernet cable and then set up a network that also uses and older airport extreme and express router (g standard).
It would appear that the local network speed is slow - how can I assess the connection speed in the local network - both wireless and for ethernet? I believe that there is a speed indication on my two older macs running OSX 10.5 but not in OSX 10.6. Is there a tool to assess the local network speed?
The current set up works less well than previously only using the Thomson router, so the initial results are very disappointing. Not even streaming music seems to work and it stutters to halt.
I had expected that the dual band functionality would allow fast local connections where needed. What do I need to change?
Thanks you.
Tom

Hi Bob,
The two old airports (extreme and express) are connected wirelessly to the time capsule base station with the following use:
- round extreme base station supports a printer only - remote WDS indicated in set up
- airport express supports remote speakers - set up does not indicate WDS status
I noticed in another note to provide a second network name to 5GHz network and connect the modern computers, ipad (seems to be able to connect) and apple tv to the 5 GHz network, leaving the other on the separate network. Also the two computers, apart from the laptops are connected via ethernet to use the GB ethernet, but I am not sure whether that speed is achieved or whether a firewire connection between the two would be better. use examples are:
1. Wirelessly I am trying to use three speakers - computer, apple tv and express - to have to listen to the same music in three rooms.
2. Over ethernet, I am using the the powermac as a file server to mac mini, but would like to be bale to access photo libraries (both Iphoto and Aperture) ideally over the network. It works well with starting the powermac in target disk mode but seems slow over what should be a very fast ethernet network.
The connection with the service providers router and time capsule is bridged - seems to be the only way of providing internet access - however, it also seems to allow for shared devices to be visible across the two time capsule and the Thomson network.
Obviously, this will need some more experimentation but any input would be appreciated.
Thank you and regards,
Tom
PS> Timezone wise I am currently living in Australia - must change my profile one day.....

Read/Write speeds with Airport Extreme and USB Hard Drives

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