Sylthe – a digital life obviously

Apple Airport Extreme with External Hard Drive Attached (Time Capsule, kinda)

I've know for a while now that you can hook up an external USB hard drive to an Apple Airport Extreme, and share the drive over the network.  The external drive can be shared to all of your network attached computers (Mac and Windows alike).  I was also interested in attaching the external hard drive for the purpose of using Time Machine (OSX backup mechanism) on my Mac mini.

I purchased a 1.5 TB Seagate external drive from the local Costco for $99.00 that was formatted for Windows (FAT file system).  I plugged the external hard drive into the Apple Airport Extreme with the supplied USB 2.0 cable.  At first the drive wasn't showing up in finder.  I ended up having to hook up the external drive to my Mac, and format it as Mac OS Extended.  I plugged the external drive back into the Apple Airport Extreme, and that seemed to fix my issue.  I did some light googling on the issue.  I wasn't able to actually find a list of supported file formats for the Apple Airport Extreme, although I didn't look that hard.

I now have a nice network attached storage device that I can backup my workstation to!

The following picture shows my internal hard drive, a 1.5 TB USB hard drive directly attached to my Mac, and the 1.5 TB external hard drive (FreeAgent) that is attached to the Apple Airport Extreme: