[RickR]

A friend of mine recently bought the Airport Extreme Base Station and put a 500Gig Western Digital MyBook Premium on it. I'm considering getting the same setup but he is having some perfomance issues which concern me.
He uses this to store media files and to make backups using Chronosync of data files. Where he ran into a problem is he's trying to use SuperDuper to do a hard drive backup. It works fine if he uses a firewire Lacie drive connected directly to his computer but when he runs into a problem is when he uses Superduper to back up to this AirDisk. It will find the backup location but often during backup fails at some point. Also, if he uses Finder to copy files over it works fine for small files or just a few files but if he transfers a large amount of data at some point it fails. He hasn't had any network performance problems in the past and is using a C2D MBP. He has even run into problems when he tries to delete files off of this AirDisk.

1. I have a Airport Extreme Base Station and have wanted to get the same drive but now I'm wondering if I'm better off getting a Ethernet drive such as the Western Digital World Edition. I know it costs a little more but would performance be better than using a drive on the Airport Base Station?

2. Is it something my friend could be doing wrong with Superduper that is causing this problem?

3. I like how with his base station anytime he restarts his mac it simply automatically logs onto this Airport Base Station drive. It seems so integrated and easy to use. Would the same be true with using a Ethernet drive? I like the simplicity of it being there and doing a 'auto logon'. I have used networked drives before where you have to go to the network to find the drives but these were shared drives on Windows machines.

[RickR]

I forgot to ask this but if I go with a Ethernet drive is there a better choice than the Western Digital Drive?

[mduell]

1. Almost undoubtedly. AirDisk is impressively slow.
But I'd buy a good ethernet (+USB if you'd like) enclosure and add a hard drive to it rather than going with one of WD's products.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by RickR 

1. I have a Airport Extreme Base Station and have wanted to get the same drive but now I'm wondering if I'm better off getting a Ethernet drive such as the Western Digital World Edition. I know it costs a little more but would performance be better than using a drive on the Airport Base Station?

If the client is accessing the drive over AirPort it should hardly matter if you connect the disk through USB with AirDisk or if you attach an Ethernet drive to one of the LAN ports. Even over 802.11n you won't see transfer rates in excess of 10 MB/s (I actually get 6MB/s max). Neither USB nor 100BaseT will achieve less than that. The bottleneck is the wireless network, not the drive's connection. That said, even if the clients are attached to the LAN ports it shouldn't make that much of difference because the LAN ports are 100BaseT rather than Gigabit.

3. I like how with his base station anytime he restarts his mac it simply automatically logs onto this Airport Base Station drive. It seems so integrated and easy to use. Would the same be true with using a Ethernet drive? I like the simplicity of it being there and doing a 'auto logon'. I have used networked drives before where you have to go to the network to find the drives but these were shared drives on Windows machines.

That should work with any network share. Mount the network partition(s). Drag it to the login items panel. Done.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Simon 

If the client is accessing the drive over AirPort it should hardly matter if you connect the disk through USB with AirDisk or if you attach an Ethernet drive to one of the LAN ports. Even over 802.11n you won't see transfer rates in excess of 10 MB/s (I actually get 6MB/s max).

Is that with AirDisk or another NAS?
The figures I've seen for AirDisk are about an order of magnitude lower (~6Mbps).

[RickR]

I like the idea of a drive enclosre with both USB and Ethernet. Are there any particular ones on the market I should look at?

[Simon]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Is that with AirDisk or another NAS?
The figures I've seen for AirDisk are about an order of magnitude lower (~6Mbps).

Not at all. We did a quick test here in the lab. There was no considerable speed difference for reads and writes when we compared a LaCie USB2 HDD (attached via AirDisk) to a NAS (forgot which one though) connected to one of the 100BaseT LAN port. There was a slight difference when we turned on WPA2. We observed about 0.2-0.3 MB/s drop due to encryption.

That said, in the very beginning when the new AP Extreme came out performance over WPA and WPA2 sucked completely (we got roughly 500kB/s over AirDisk at the time). Apple fixed the firmware bug with the first AP Update and ever since speeds have been in line with what you'd expect from a 802.11n network. Of course if you run these tests on a 802.11g client you will see a drop in speeds - but that applies to every connection made from the 802.11g client, not just AirDisk.

Ars also noticed the AirDisk performance improvement after the firmware update (although their increases were less than our - possibly because they weren't using WPA2).

So if you're getting a mere 6Mb/s with your AirDisk on an 802.11n connection either your signal is really bad or your wireless setup is screwed up.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by RickR 

I like the idea of a drive enclosre with both USB and Ethernet. Are there any particular ones on the market I should look at?

LaCie has a pretty good reputation. Their disks aren't dirt cheap, but they are reliable and sturdy; and you don't want to skimp on HDDs anyway. If you want Ethernet and USB2 you should take a look at the LaCie Ethernet Disk mini. If you need a lot of space they also offer the 1TB LaCie Ethernet Big Disk.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by RickR 

I like the idea of a drive enclosre with both USB and Ethernet. Are there any particular ones on the market I should look at?

Newegg.com - OKGEAR LAN-BK Aluminum 3.5" USB & Ethernet Networking Enclosure - Retail
or
Newegg.com - CP TECHNOLOGIES CP-UL-300 Aluminum and plastic 3.5" USB 2.0 & RJ-45 (10/100 Ethernet) Network Storage HD CASE - Retail

Add whatever size hard drive you want from here.

Better drive, lower price, and 2.5x longer warranty than that LaCie garbage.

[MeOw On Me]

You can greatly improve the preformance of the Air Disk by first connecting your new HD to your Mac and formatting it with HFS/HFS+. Upon doing that, my upload/download speed nearly doubled.