AirPort Extreme + USB Drive = Sluggish Time Capsule

March 24th, 2008

Filed under 802.11g, 802.11b & Bluetooth Adapters

The recent Airport update is perhaps the most important firmware yet made available to AirPort Extreme users, especially for those running Leopard. Prior to the patch release, owners of the AirPort Extreme router were only able to mount their USB storage connected to the router as an AirDisk, but they should now be pleased to find out the update now includes the much anticipated 10.5's Time Machine compatibility.

We gave it a shot over the weekend; the drive discovery, backup process and even the restore worked perfectly as advertised, like the Time Capsule. Unfortunately, the backup speed was horribly slow on either 802.11n and Gigabit. The best throughout we ever got was 6MB/s, at which speed we reckoned had something to do with the processor handling the USB traffic. (The Buffalo Turbo USB 320GB we tested with is very competent for this type of task.) In the end, we had to leave our laptops running overnight to give it enough time for the backup to complete. We did try to improvise by first backing up over USB, but that didn't quite work after mounting the disk as a Time Machine container. Fortunately, subsequent incremental backups over the wireless network were a lot smoother largely due to the smaller amount of data needed to be transferred. That is unless you decide to begin with another 10GB video editing project.

Apple Time Capsule (500GB)

$294.00