Airport Extreme(n)

It’s been about a week, and I’ve been surfing along nicely on my new Airport Extreme(n). There are some significant improvements when compared to my original Airport Extreme.

The most notable new feature for me is the ability share USB Hard drives. Before the new Airport arrived, I purchased a two new usb Hard Drive enclosures for some drives I had lying around and a 7 port USB hub specifically for the new router. With the hub I’m able to plug in multiple drives as well as my printer and have them all accessible wirelessly. This has allowed me to move my entire iTunes music library off my MacBook Pro and onto the external Hard Drive that is shared wirelessly. And with the 802.11n speeds, music & videos stream beautifully (as I had hoped).

But I may have set hopes too high. I also attempted place my entire iPhoto library on the shared drive, and while it technically worked, it was far too slow to be usable. Just scrolling through the library would introduce the never ending beachball. I’m hoping that Apple plans to leverage this new wireless sharing ability with iLife 07. You can now share from computer to computer with the iLife 06 apps, but it would be nice if they were built to recognize a centrally shared library and had the smarts to handle multiple users using the same library.

A future benefit of the shared drives will be once Leopard comes out. With it’s time machine backup feature, you should be able to have your computer automatically backed up without the need to physically plug-in an external drive.

I should also mention that it seems to share any type of storage media that will plug into the USB port, such as the little USB keys that are all the rage. It even seems to mount media cards that are plugged into an external media card reader. My printer that is shared has a built in media card reader and any media cards that are plugged into it also mount, which was a nice surprise

Some other things I like:

  • Increased range. (I now get full signal bars anywhere in my house)
  • More reliable printer sharing. (The previous Airport was always a bit flaky for me)
  • Nicer Admin Utility.
  • Shared drives automatically mount when your on the network.
  • 3 Ethernet ports. (as opposed to 1 on the previous airport)

So far the only real issue I’ve come across is getting my Nintendo DS lite to connect to the network. It seems to be because of the Airport’s new “Transitional Security” that combines WEP and WAP. Even though I enter the WEP key, the DS still won’t connect. This seems to be a common issue with gaming consoles in general. And since I’m in no way turning off wireless security, my solution has been to plug in my old Airport Extreme into the new one and create a separate network which the DS can connect. I’m hoping that a firmware update will resolve this issue.