So, my bad consumer urges took over my brain and forced me to buy a 1TB Hitachi external hard drive. The drive works great connected directly to my Macbook Pro running Leopard, however, it barely works at all when plugged into my Airport Extreme base station. The first time I plugged it in, the Airport Extreme’s name showed up under the “SHARED” drop down in Finder, but clicking on it revealed an empty folder. Investigating the base station using the Airport Utility revealed that the drive was indeed recognized. With that in mind, I decided to reformat the 1TB partition using journaled HFS+ thinking that would trim all the FAT off. Unfortunately, it took about six hours to recopy the 500GB of data from my old external Maxtor drive to the Hitachi after the format. After all of that, I hooked-up the drive to the Airport again, and … nothing.

Clearly, there should be a drive listed here.

The only logical course of action that I could think of at this point was to pickup the drive and throw at the wall as hard as I could. My theory was that the impact would probably “reseat” the faulty memory chips inside the disk. Dinner was ready at this point. So, I surreptitiously recorded this idea into my Moleskine for later consideration.

After dinner, I decided to delay the swift-and-blinding-violence tactic, and wade through Apple’s discussion site for a while. I learned that you could mount the drive by selecting “Go”, then “Connect to Server…” and then typing in the Airport Extreme’s IP address. This allowed Finder to access the drive, and it worked well for about an hour, but after that it became slow, then unreachable. Then, I rebooted the Airport Extreme base station, and then rebooted Leopard. Again, the drive worked for a while, but after a period of idle, the drive was inaccessible again. The Apple discussions mentioned that downgrading the firmware from 7.2.1 to 7.1 seemed to fix the issue for a few users. Unfortunately, my base station would only allow me to downgrade as low as 7.2.

This kind of snafu is very un-Applelike. Thankfully, this is the first major problem that I’ve had with using Leopard so far. It’s hard to believe that something as basic as using an external hard disk with the Airport Extreme would work this poorly with Leopard. I mean, 10.5 has been out for over two months now. If any of you kids out there know how to do the magic dance to make my disk work with the Airport, please drop me some comment gold.