![]() Click the Manual Setup button on the bottom of the window, then (after a moment), click on the Disks icon on the top. When it opens, it should show you your AirPort Extreme in the left column. Like the Disk Utility, you’ll find it in your Mac’s Applications > Utilities folder. You now need to use the AirPort Utility on a Mac to reconfigure your AirPort Extreme. But your AirPort Extreme needs to be told to actually share the connected disk. Now you can connect the disk to an AirPort Extreme’s USB port – or if you want to share both a hard drive (or hard drives) and a printer using the base station’s single USB port, you can use a USB hub to connect multiple USB devices. Now you can apply the settings to create a Mac OS Extended Partition. Click OK to return to the main dialogue box window. Change that setting to GUID Partition Table (for Intel-based Macs). You’ll see that the disk is still set to use a DOS-style Master Boot Record. In that Disk Utility dialogue box, you need to click the Options… button. There’s one more step needed before partitioning and formatting the drive in this way. Thinking that was enough, I’d clicked Apply… but the resulting drive wasn’t actually usable. Change the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). In Disk Utility, select the external drive and click on the Partition tab.Ĭlick on Volume Scheme to drop down a list of options, selecting 1 Partition. That means connecting it to a Mac’s USB port and opening the Disk Utility program (in Applications > Utilities). Instead, the drive needs to be repartitioned using Apple’s Disk Utility. (Seagate also offers FreeAgent models aimed at the Mac market.) That’s not a bad choice, making the drive instantly usable by the largest market segment, but it won’t be accessible connected to the AirPort Extreme. Like most external hard drives not specifically aimed at Mac users, the Dell drive – a Seagate FreeAgent model – came formatted as a Windows NTFS partition. (None of these steps are mentioned in the AirPort Extreme User Guide, for instance). ![]() It is relatively straightforward, but there are a few under-documented things to be aware of along the way. It’s not quite that simple, as I discovered. Rather than connect it directly to the iMac, however, I thought I would see about connecting it to the AirPort Extreme’s built-in USB port, making what sometimes is referred to as an AirDisk.Īpple describes what it calls AirPort Disk as “a simple and convenient way to share files among everyone in your family, office, or class”, claiming “just connect the external hard drive to. Dell Canada, however, had an external 1.5 GB drive on sale for C$150 (about US$130), which seemed like a nice price for quite a bit more storage space. (See my article Time Machine Can Now Backup to a Shared Hard Drive.)īut backing up two Macs to that 500 GB drive, I’d started to run low on drive space. ![]() I have an AirPort Extreme until recently, I’d been connecting a generic 500 GB external USB drive to my iMac and using it to back up both the iMac and my MacBook using OS X 10.5’s Time Machine backup software. A Time Capsule with a 500 GB drive boosts the price to $299 the 1 TB model jumps to $499. ![]() And Time Capsule is a relatively expensive way to add storage, even when added to the price of Apple’s high-end AirPort Extreme.Īpple’s US online store lists the AirPort Extreme base station (with no built-in storage) for $179. However, many users already have either a wireless base station (also referred to as a wireless router) or an external hard drive – or both. Apple’s Time Capsule, building the equivalents of an AirPort Extreme router and either a 500 GB or 1 TB hard drive into a single unit, is a space-saving and easy-to-use way for users to combine a wireless base station and storage accessible over a home or small business network – and even across the Internet. ![]()
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