AirPort Extreme with AirPort Disk
The new AirPort Extreme base station includes 802.11n, of course. It also has three Ethernet LAN ports (eliminating the need for a hub in many cases) and can share USB hard disks as well as printers. I’m not sure whether it’s using WebDAV or AppleShare, but if the latter it should be possible to Smart Update a laptop wirelessly—no server Mac required.
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I pre-ordered one of these right away. But I am a little concerned that they don't specify USB 2.0. USB 1 would be useless hard drive-wise...
The USB port also supports hubs for adding multiple devices. I could've used this functionality on the Airport Express to connect both my laser printer and my photo printer.
I wish the airport Disk would make use of a 1394 port instead though.. I also wonder how much the speed boost would be compared to accessing a drive mounted on another mac
I just can't believe that the ethernet switch only support 10/100 ethernet. Even new MacBooks have gigabit ethernet cards, and it does make a big difference when transferring large files over file sharing or from a networked disk... it seems like it should have been an obvious choice...
Chris Stone says that the sharing is via AFP and SMB and that the volumes will auto-mount when you log into your Mac.
MacInTouch finds the performance disappointing and notes that AirPort Disk doesn’t let the USB drives spin down.
