I have been playing with connecting my multifunctional printer and scanner the HP PSC 1315 to the Apple Airport Extreme unit using a USB cable.
The marketing features describe how one can connect a hard drive or printer using the USB conection on the Airport extreme.
Unfortunately I have concluded that this software sucks both for printers and for hard drives. I would of expected Apple to provide a proxy USB interface so to a device driver installed on the Mac it thinks the device is actually connected to the Mac and doesn’t know about a network relay to the Airport USB. For hard drives also providing a layer of intelligence to sync write caches.
What Apple have built clearly doesn’t provide this type of interface leaving companies like HP, in this case, at the mercy of Apple to provide a correct interface description specifically to use the USB port on the Airport Extreme. In my mind this defeats the whole purpose of the USB port on the Airport Express and Extreme.
The only compatible multi functional devices that are supported are WiFi based. Reading various blogs and forums I also conclude that connecting a hard drive and trying to use Time Machine is frought with difficulty. I have even tried this myself and it did not work.
Apple – please sort this out. We want the USB port on the Airport range of products to work like any other USB on the Mac!
Paul said
Coming to the defense of Apple…
I’ve been using Time Machine to back-up to my airport drive for about two weeks with flawless performance. The difference between my success and the failures of others seems to be apple’s updated firmware (that came out early in 2008) and correctly formatting the drive.
Coming (as i did) from the Windows world many users want to format their drives with a with a FAT partition and an MBR. While that will work for simple file sharing it won’t support the large disk image that time machine uses. Instead plug the drive into a mac before connecting it to the Airport Extreme and create a new partition selecting a GUID Partition Table and MAC OS Extended (Journaled) Format. After that plug it into the airport and you’re ready to go.
Mine is currently hosting three drives, from different manufactures and in a variety of enclosures, for a total of two terabytes of storage, half of which I’ve filled over the network without a single failure.
One five hundred gig drive is used for time machine on my MacBook, one for time machine on my wife’s, and a terabyte drive holds our media which we access from a Vista media center running Boxee and our macs.
As far as printer sharing goes I’ve been extremely pleased that it is not just a USB pass through like the netgear box I used previously. It’s amazingly simple to plug a printer in (so old that a vista driver isn’t available for it) and just have it recognized on every Mac and Windows machine on my network (running bonjour). I hate fidgeting and futtsing around with drivers for Vista, XP, Tiger, Leopard, and Windows 7 all of which i have on my network.
To be honest I haven’t tried an “all in one” device… I have one sitting in front of me… i was “googling” to see if it would be supported (like the guy in the apple store told me it would) when I came across you blog. Honestly I don’t expect the scanner or the card reader’s to work. God I hope they do but I can’t complain much since it came for free with purchase of a MacBook.
If you’d like I can post back with my experiences… if i remember.