The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    External drive for Airport Extreme?

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by hoolyproductions, Oct 21, 2007.

  1. hoolyproductions

    hoolyproductions Notebook Evangelist

    Reputations:
    42
    Messages:
    408
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    I bought an airport extreme on Friday. I love it, and it has boosted my signal compared to my old modem, so I now have good wireless all over my apartment :)

    I set up AirDisk using a small external USB drive just to test it out, but I want to get something with a bigger capacity and am looking for recommendations.

    Whilst I realise that pretty much any drive will work, I noticed some people seem concerned about being unable to 'sleep' their drives before turning them off, so now I am a little worried

    1) will leaving a drive plugged into my airport all the time be detrimental to the drive?

    2) If I get a drive with a external power and an off switch, can I just turn it off without worrying about 'parking' it???

    Or in other words, am I worried about nothing :)
     
    hoolyproductions, Oct 21, 2007
    #1
  2. sulkorp

    sulkorp Notebook Deity

    Reputations:
    145
    Messages:
    1,192
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    55
    Congrats on getting the airport!

    1) I think if anything, turning on and off the hdd constantly (like a lot of times per day) could be worse for the drive then letting it spin constantly. Also I think some external enclosures automatically put the drive to sleep if its not being used. It looks like mine does it, and unless windows and osx have the same sleep mode on external drives, then it is the enclosure.

    If data is being written/read to the drive and you just shut it off, I think that may be bad for the drive.

    So if you enclosure automatically puts the hdd to sleep, and unless apple has some kinda weird setting where it wont let it go to sleep(and you try to turn it off), I think you should be fine leaving it on 24/7 connected to the airport.

    Maybe if you wanna turn it off, turn it off when your not awake or at you home, so if someone hacks your network, they dont get your data.
     
    sulkorp, Oct 21, 2007
    #2