Airport Extremed, almost.

So I finally made the decision to upgrade my wireless network at home to the fancy new Airport Extreme released recently by Apple. What’s the big deal you say? Well, for starters it supports the draft 802.11n protocol which means a more reliable, increased range, and faster wireless experience. And, this beauty has the exciting Airport Disk function which lets me hook up any amount (yet to be tested) of USB drives and share them over the wireless network. It’s like an el cheapo NAS for dummies.

I am having problems though (gasp!) with Airport Disk. Shock! Horror! Folders were not showing up, and files magically disappeared - thank god after reconnecting them directly to my Macbook they were still there. My drives are currently formatted in the FAT32 file system and are over the 32 gigabyte threshold which seems to be causing problems. I did this initially because I wanted to be able to read/write to my external hard disks in both Windows and OS X, and the latter does not support writing to NTFS drives (uhum which brings the question, Apple, why not?). Since Airport Disk uses SAMBA, i’m thinking the most logical thing to do is convert my FAT32 drives to HFS which is my mission over the next few days.

Oh, I also picked up this funky Belkin USB/Firewire hub to go with the thing. Fits perfectly all snug and sexy beneath the base station!

A wireless iTunes library for my MacBook Pro? Bring it on!