AirPort Extreme and external hard drive combination behaving badly.

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AirPort Extreme and external hard drive combination behaving badly.

Ever since I got my AirPort Extreme, I've had this OWC dual drive enclosure hooked up to it, with two 1TB Seagate Momentus 7200.11 drives in it. One drive for media storage, the other for Time Machine backups. Worked beautifully. Until this week, that is. Sometimes the drives are disconnected somehow, and when that happens I can't access the base station's settings through the AirPort Utility. Only when I physically disconnect the external drives from the AirPort Extreme, can the latter be accessed through the AirPort Utility again. Very weird. I checked both drives in the enclosure with Disk Utility. Both needed (minor) repair. I repaired both and reconnected them to the Extreme. But...

Bam!

Same problem, all over again. And again. And again. Very frustrating. Also, the drives (I don't know if it's both or just one) make a weird skipping noise since a few days when unpowering and repowering the enclosure. That's something I certainly didn't heard before. This has me thinking one of the drives might by dying. But isn't it weird, then, that when directly connected to my MacBook, both drives can be easily accessed without any problems whatsoever?

Anybody with a similar experience? I have no means to check the SMART status for the drives in the enclosure, as the enclosure doesn't support SMART. Also, it's a 3.5" enclosure, so the drives obviously don't fit in my MacBook. So there's no way to check their status, I think. Any ideas?

Anyone?

AirPort Extreme-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jul 16, 2011 3:01 AM

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Answer 1

Jolly Giant

Level 7

25,484 points

Jul 16, 2011 3:34 AM in response to Bengt77

Bengt77 wrote:

AirPort Extreme ... Time Machine backups

excerpt from this user tip:

Note: backing-up this way is not reliable and is not supported by Apple.

See: Using Time Machine with an Airport Extreme AirDisk for details.

See Time Machine FAQ #2 for other, more reliable ways to back up with Time Machine.

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Answer 2

Bengt77 Author

Level 1

0 points

Jul 16, 2011 6:47 AM in response to Jolly Giant

Thanks for your reply. Although if it's not reliable and not supported by Apple, then why was it working just beautifully before? I had no trouble at all using the drive(s) this way, connected to my AirPort Extreme. Very weird. Again, it might be that either one of the drives or the enclosure itself is failing. Then again, all is working fine when directly connected to my MacBook.

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

160,780 points

Jul 16, 2011 3:57 PM in response to Bengt77

Although if it's not reliable and not supported by Apple, then why was it working just beautifully before?

The saying: "Just cause you can, doesn't mean you should." is appropriate here.

Although it can work, it is known to be troublesome AND why Apple does not support it for Time Machine backups. Interestingly Apple originally touted that the 1st generation Extremes would support this feature, but before it was released to the public they dropped it.

If or until Apple offers an update to allow it to do so, similar to the Time Capsule's Time Machine support for USB drives, all we can offer is our condolences to your failed backups and to recommend that you don't continue doing so if your backups are critical to you.

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Answer 4

Bengt77 Author

Level 1

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Jul 16, 2011 4:19 PM in response to Tesserax

Thank you, I guess. What you're saying is perfectly clear, even though I don't like it. Shame that it's not supported and implemented in a better, actually reliably functional way. Until that day comes, I'll just continue with my other, original backup routine: weekly clones using SuperDuper!. I really liked the extra peace of mind from having additional Time Machine backups, though. But alas, no more for now...

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