Apple Airport Extreme (802.11n) - First Impressions..

I finally got round to ordering one of these now that I'd finally finished doing all my end of year accounts and could prioritise what kit I was going to buy this year, below are my thoughts after my first day living with it.

Prior to getting hold of this router I'd been using a D-Link 524 802.11b/g router to share my net connection (Virgin Media Cable Broadband), I've never owned an Airport router before as they didn't seem to offer enough for me for the price. This one is a whole different story.

First and foremost, the main reason I wanted this was for the ability to put all my external hard drives on the network so I didn't have to keep plugging and unplugging fro my laptop. I have 4 external drives, one for personal stuff and music etc and the others for various work related things and backups.

Out of the box the first thing that struck me about it was the weight, it's very heavy compared to my D-Link and it feels like a real quality product.
I'd also bought a Belkin USB hub designed for the Mac mini that is the same footprint as the Airport Extreme too enable me to connect all my peripherals while keeping things tidy.

Setup was a breeze, except for the hour I spent untangling cables before I got it all in to place but that's down to my own messiness, there's something about sleek white equipment that makes you want to keep everything around it nice.

The new Airport Utility that came on the CD was quick to install and after a reboot of my system it automatically found the Airport network and connected to it before guiding me through the steps to configure it to work with my cable modem.
This part took under 5 minutes and was easy as pie.

What came next was a little more long winded but that was down more to my system config than a failing of the unit itself.
I'd bought a new Western Digital MyBook drive to attach to the base station which was, with the printer, the first device I connected yet it wasn't immediately picked up by the system. I still have no idea why this was but after hooking it up directly to my laptop, formatting it with the Mac HFS file system and reconnecting it everything was fine.

The printer was seen straight away and cased no problems at all.

The only minor issue I had was working out that you need to toggle manual mode in Airport Utility to set up the drives properly.
As some of my external HDD's already had documents on, when I configured the access for each user, the result was that these files seemingly had disappeared, again I've not looked in to the official reasons for this but it was a little disconcerting to see years of files and backups vanish.

It turns out that when you enable access on a user basis, Airport creates several sub-folders on the drive, namely 'Shared' containing files visible to all, and 'Users' containing a sub-folder for each named user and their private files. What happens then is that only files within these folders are visible on the network, so all the files that were already on the drives needed to be moved in to one of the sub-folders before they were accessible.

Once I'd disabled user access, moved everything in to my user directory and re-enabled user access everything was fine and I stopped panicking.

Apart from that blip in the process setup was easy, much more so than your normal router including my D-Link 524 which, upon installing it for the first time a few years back took about 4 hours and much Googling to find out how to make it work properly with OS X and my Cable modem.

Tonight has been great in the first few hours with it, the speed is noticeably faster, even though I'm only on a 802.11g laptop, the same goes for the iMac connected to it over ethernet.
Signal strength is good so far and it's travelling well through the brick walls in the house with no dead spots at all.

The clincher is definitely the printing and drive sharing though.
Printing before was long winded for me as the printer was connected to an iMac in one room shared wirelessly via Printer Sharing and the D-Link router to my laptop, the print queue would often stop for no reason requiring me to go and open the print queue on the iMac and fiddle with something before the job would complete.
No such problems here, the printing is smooth and FAST!

Same for the drives, Instead of having hard drives and cables surrounding me everything is tucked away and accessible at a click.
For daily stuff like opening and saving documents to the drives there is no noticeable speed difference to them being connected directly via USB 2.0.
I did move a 14.58GB folder from my one network drive to another and it was slow. Painfully slow in fact. it took about 4 hours to move that folder, but it didn't hamper my performance at all on my laptop so while it was tedious it happened in the background and wasn't a problem for me.

Overall the Airport Extreme is a fantastic piece of kit. I did have to really question spending £119 on a router when I could get three standard ones for that money, but it was well worth it.
By no means is it an industrial solution for people who need real corporate network performance but that's not what it's designed for. In addition, this could come in very handy to be able to schedule regular automatic backups that you can set to run overnight.

If you need an easy way to share files, printers and internet it's probably the best product on the market today.
Highly recommended!

Apologies for length of post!