February 23, 2007
AirPort Extreme on USB device support
Posted Feb. 23, ’07, 2:04 PM PT by Scott Silverman
Category | Hardware
Apple has posted a support document to their site which clarifies some details on the AirPort Extreme’s NAS abilities. It supports drives formatted as HFS+, FAT16, or FAT32. Unfortunately no NTFS support, so if you were planning on using NAS with a PC it’s a no-go (unless you’re willing to settle with FAT32 partitioning). Apple notes that the drive’s block size must be 512 byes. Also of interest is how the AirPort Extreme shares your drive based on its formatting:
The AirPort Extreme (802.11n) shares storage devices based on the format used to initialize the storage device. For example, if HFS-plus formatting was used, AFP and SMB/CIFS protocols are used to share the device on the network. If FAT16 or FAT32 was used, SMB/CIFS protocols are used.
Lastly is a note that the AirPort’s NAS will not work with multiple partitions on a single drive. Yes, this means no RAID support, which doesn’t bother me too much, but I am a bit upset that I can’t have multiple partitions on one NAS drive.
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I have a USB drive with 4 partitions connected to my new Apple Airport. This may not be supported config by Apple, but it has worked for me so far. I have automouting enabled, so when I connect to the network, all 4 drives mount.
Yes, I can confirm the first comment from jsweet. While I did have problems getting the disk to work after the 2 partitions were created over a direct FireWire connection (unplugging the power from the Airport Extreme and restarting it resolved the problem - software restart doesn't work) it is now working fine and both partitions mount upon connection to the network. I have heard of people having problems with this on various forums so perhaps compatibility is not 100%, hence the article. However, it works fine for me using an Iomega MiniMax 320GB drive so I'm very happy.