“Apple announced its new Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) this week with a bit less fanfare than enjoyed by its other two new products. Sure, the new AEBS won’t change the world, but it does have one new feature that will bring joy to quite a few households. Apple calls it AirPort Disk, and it provides cheap, Apple-simple network storage to home networks,” Chris Stone writes for O’Reilly’s Mac DevCenter.
Stone writes, “The current version of the AEBS includes a USB port that allows network sharing of whatever USB printer is plugged into it. The new version uses a similar USB 2.0 port, but now allows you to plug in a USB storage device, which then becomes shared over the network. You can also plug in a USB hub if you need to share both a printer and disk, or multiples of them. Apple’s not the first to do something like this, but as usual, makes it the easiest.”
Stone writes, “You can attach just about any USB hard drive, formatted either as HFS+ or FAT, and it will become available for sharing using both AFP and SMB protocols and therefore accessible like any other network volumes to Mac, Windows and (presumably) Linux clients on the network.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Mike H.” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Apple’s new AirPort Extreme supports 802.11n, enables wireless streaming of HD media – January 10, 2007
Apple introduces new AirPort Extreme with 802.11n – January 09, 2007
F’n sweet!
Sounds great for wireless network backup and massive multimedia storage.
And be double sure to secure your network especially with a drive hanging off of it.
Although, I do enjoy driving into neighborhoods and be able to join open networks.
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Anybody know if multiple computers can access it directly as a source for iTunes and iPhoto?
Linksys routers have had this for a long time. Way to “lead”, Apple…
Why not FIREWIRE???!!!
To me, this was the best news from macworld. This, with a macmini core 2 duo – wireless n, will bring my content to my TV. Not Apple TV.
I so wish this had a firewire 800 port on it, of course, I know that the airport isn’t as fast as that but if they combined it with a gigiabit ethernet port it’d be sweet.
My AEBS is only a year or so old, so I don’t want to replace it, but I have been wanting networked attached storage for a while now. I hope apple releases a firmware update for the old AEBS, cause I am saving my money for an iPhone. 😀
So why didn’t they just push a firmware upgrade to allow this on the Airport express?
No upgrade for older BSs because they do not have USB2 – you need this for the HDs.
How about a Apple miniRAID system with the same form factor (though higher or stackable) that could sit underneath it? Going to be needing somewhere to back up all that iTunes data.
Seriously. However, from reports I hear, it is basically a computer, so, I imagine you could hack it to do something like that.
I wonder if it will work with a Windows PC on a network. At present my Windows machine cannot see the USB printer attached to my base station directly, but rather through a network connection to my iMac….
Anyone know?
Ben, to make your Windows PC see the printer in your current base station, you need to download Bonjour for Windows from http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows.html