“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
Now we know why Cisco has its corporate panties in a wad. The AirPort Extreme is a Linksys killer.
I’m with the “why not add firewire crowd?” I have over a terabyte of daisy chained FireWire hard drives; and it would be super cool to just connect them to the wireless base station, instead of directly to my laptop. I wouldn’t use it for video, but for 80% of my file storage and even a large portion of my music, wireless FireWire connection would be more than sufficient.
I know USB2 is more multi-platform, but FireWire still offers better performance, even FireWire 400. So while a number of my drives do have multiple options—FireWire 400, 800, or USB2.0—a few only have FireWire 400; and I don’t plan to get rid of them.
Firewire shouldn’t be abandoned it should be embraced because its superior
I can think of a few reasons why no Firewire:
1. Few windows machines have it. Apple may want to market this more aggressively to PC owners.
2. 801.11n is WAY slower than Firewire, so even if you had firewire, you still wouldn’t be able to get the data to and from the drive any faster than 802.11n. In a wireless environment, Firewire is not the bottleneck. (obviously, if you run ethernet cables to the base station, then Firewire would be the bottleneck)
3. Firewire 400–which is really their only option for this device–is not much faster than USB 2.0.
4. Firewire 400 in this environment is less versatile than USB 2, since most printers are USB. If they added Firewire, they’d also have to add USB, and perhaps that just wasn’t reasonable, given design/pricing constraints.
How about eSATA? And throw in a serial and parallel port too.
People, here is why there is no Firewire 400 or 800 or Gigabit ethernet on the new Airport Extreme Base Station:
Wireless
802.11b 11 Mbps
802.11g 54 Mbps
802.11n 108 Mbps
Internet
Broadband 1 – 1.5 Mbps
Ethernet
10 Base-T 10 Mbps
100 Base-T 100 Mbps
1000 Base-T 1000 Mbps (1 Gbps)
Firewire
400 400 Mbps
800 800 Mbps
USB
1.1 12 Mbps
2.0 480 Mbps
As you can see, even the 802.11n protocol tops out at 108Mbps (theoretical), and even though USB 2.0 won’t ever reach its full stated speed either, it will still easily saturate the wireless channel.
We’re going to have to wait until a wireless protocol has a 10x speed increase before it would become practical to use Firewire 800 instead of USB and Gigabit ethernet instead of 10/100 Base-T.
Including Firewire 400 in the new Airport Extreme would certainly have been nice, but would have added to the cost of the device.
I do much prefer Firewire but Apple STUFFED UP by (1) not making the 400 and 800 plug/socket physically identical and backwards compatible, as per the USB 1.1 / 2.0 plug/socket combo and (2) not initially giving it away. As a result, Firewire 800 remains a niche product, as is even FW400 to a lesser extent because it’s still not standard on many new PCs, unlike our beloved and superior Macs.
hairbo:
Your reasoning for no Firewire is right on the mark. I’m glad the two external 3.5-inch drives I have currently are dual interface, USB 2.0 or Firewire.
Re: Previous post
No deal. Mac-compatible network drives are few and far between in my neighborhood. I found only one that would work and it was 2x what it cost on the internet so I couldn’t go there.
If someone has successfully used a network drive through an old Airport Extreme Base Station, let us know…
The theoretical burst of USB2 is 480Mbps (megabits per second) versus Firewire 400’s 400Mbps.
I have a 500GB Western Digital MyBook Premium (USB2 and FW400). I’ve found that for transferring large files (video files ala Final Cut Pro) the USB2 transfers about 18-19 MBps (megabytes per second) versus the FW400’s transfer of about 32MBps. This is both on a MBP core duo 2.13 w/2GB memory and an internal 100GB 7200rpm drive and also a Mac mini core duo 1.8 w/2GB memory and an internal 120GB drive.
I have also seen the Firewire interface, even the FW400 and not even the FW800, advertized this way:
Has USB2 for maximum compatibility. Use Firewire for high performance needs.
Regardless of the speed of the wireless networking, in the case of this new AEBS, gigabit ethernet would be very sweet for all of your wired networked computers, and adding a Firewire port would, as has been pointed out, make it easier for people to attach their existing hard drives.
Regarding the different FW400 and FW800 connectors: I wonder if there were electrical issues with carrying that kind of bandwidth on the FW400 connectors and cables, necessitating a different connector. It would seem unlikely considering the ability to transport Ethernet 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1000 Mbps, and the 10Gbps all on RJ45, although it is a possibility.
“Linksys routers have had this for a long time. Way to “lead”, Apple…”
Apple is copying a lot from Cisco these days.
“Has USB2 for maximum compatibility. Use Firewire for high performance needs.”
Use USB2 for low cost and compatibility. Use eStata for low cost and high performance. Use Firewire 800 if you don’t know any better.
“It would seem unlikely considering the ability to transport Ethernet 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1000 Mbps, and the 10Gbps all on RJ45, although it is a possibility.”
Actually, 10 Gbps Ethernet is strictly optical, it just uses the ethernet protocol. Also, while it seems like 10/100 and Gigabit use the same cable, Cat5(e) is technically only rated up to 10/100 speeds; you are supposed to use Cat6 cable to carry Gigabit.
Slight correction:
Cat6a, which is currently unreleased, is supposed to support 10Gb/s.
I’m not sure if anyone is reading these comments anymore (last one dated Feb 15), but I’ll post anyways. From a hardware engineering perspective, it’s not practical to put in all of the technologies that the “wishful thinkers” above have moaned and groaned for.
Keep in mind that each additional technology added into the base station costs money and provides one more thing that can go wrong in the design. This results in optimization decisions that cut out fringe technologies. This is a consumer device targeted at home users, so Apple has made their design decisions accordingly.
For example, at the moment, home users have little need for Gigabit Ethernet and it has very poor penetration in the consumer space. Also, Gig-E chips and IP are relatively expensive compared to their slower counterparts. Look up the pricing on Gig-E routers (many run in the same price range as the AirPort Extreme 802.11n, without USB sharing and wireless).
eSATA is another fringe technology. It may become a major player in the future, but at the moment almost nobody has eSATA devices let alone an eSATA port on their computer. No way Apple is going to design something with such low adoption and high development cost into their device.
Not including firewire was also wise, both in terms of cost and engineering. Firewire was not designed as a host-centric system. As a result, devices have to negotiate amongst themselves for bus time. This results in very inefficient daisy-chaining of devices. USB on the otherhand is host-centric. Thus, it daisy-chains much better than Firewire. Although you may see better performance with Firewire with only a single device connected, USB will perform better when it comes to multiple devices connected together. Since this is what the AirPort Extreme purports to do, Apple’s design decision makes perfect sense.
This is of course a rather brief explanation of the logic behind engineering design decisions without delving much into engineering itself. You’ll have to do more digging if you want to get even more technical.