So I made the decision to use the built in functionality of the Airport Extreme Base Station's print and file sharing services. I went to Best Buy yesterday, shelled out my $179.00 and walked out. I hooked up a 500GB USB drive and went about my merry way to finally having a flexible NAS.
Setup for the Base Station was easy. I did some homework first though and here are some suggestions if you want to set one up yourself. I have what I like to call Acquired Knowledge - This means through trial and error I can save you a few steps.
1.RTFM - Read the Fine Manual. This comes in PDF from Apple's Site and as a paper manual in the box.
2. Format the disk using something other than Windows. I had multiple problems when the disk was formatted using NTFS, FAT32, and UDF. There were nothing but errors when using NTFS, FAT32 does not (beyond theoretical) support disks larger than 32GB, and UDF simply wasn't seen. I finally used Apple Disk Utility in 10.3.9 and from that moment on the Airport Software could see, mount, and share the disk.
3. Copy files via USB prior to establishing connection. I timed the transfer of my iTunes Library (26GB). It took 3 hours over G, 2.5 over N, and roughly 30 min over USB2.0.
4. Make sure to do all the updates to the Airport Base Station prior to disk install, this includes the firmware.
5. Make sure your wireless cards support WPA2. This is critical if you want to move on to something better than WEP.
6. For Heaven's Sake - Secure your network. Don't leave your network open, especially with the optional disk and printers attached. Password protect your network as well as your disk. Personally I did not use the "workgroup" option when setting up the disk.
Enjoy
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