Apple’s new AirPort Extreme ‘AirPort Disk’ feature: cheap, simple network storage for home networks

“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.]

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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