AirPort Extreme AC router hard drive access SLOW

Question

2010MBPRO Author

Level 1

0 points

AirPort Extreme AC router hard drive access SLOW

Just bought a new AC AirPort Extreme router. I can stream 1080p movies from the Internet no problem, but read/write/delete from hard drive attached to the AirPort is SLOW.

45min to delete 4 files. (this is ridiculous)
up to five min to see contents of clicked folder. (sometimes it never shows you the contents)
from the same MBPro I can get 20Mbps downloads on the Internet, not a network issue.
I see the same slowness on a windows 7 machine connected to the AEP on a gigabit LAN connection.
On occasion the AEP just gives up and reboots while trying to accessing a hard drive. Otherwise rock solid performance.

I have 2 self powered USB HDD's (Western Digital, Toshiba) attached via powered USB hub (Belkin).

Hardware specs:

2010 MBP - CPU i7 2.66GHz - 8GB Ram - OS X 10.8.5

2013 AEP version 7.7.1

Toshiba USB HDD 750 GB (Mac OS Extended (Journaled))

Western Digital USB HDD 1 TB (Mac OS Extended (Journaled))

Why would it be so slow? (oddly, removing the Toshiba drive helps, but a little)

AirPort Extreme-OTHER

Posted on Sep 13, 2013 3:11 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

148,745 points

Sep 13, 2013 3:47 PM in response to 2010MBPRO

Please check out the following AirPort User Tip about what you can expect for storage throughput performance on the AirPort routers. Although this was written for the 802.11n models, it hold reasonablly well for the newest 802.11ac a well.

Another source is SmallNetBuilder. They recently tested storage performance on the 802.11ac Extreme and found it less than stellar (around 2.4 MBps) for Windows clients.

Reply