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User profile for user: Jordan843
Jordan843 Author
User level: Level 1
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Airport Extreme and Windows

Hi everyone I have been looking for a new router for my home network and have stumbled onto the Airport Extreme. I was looking for a router that would suport a external USB hard drive. I got worried about when I found out that the Airport does not suport NTFS but only FAT32 and HFS+. FAT32 is not a option because I have lots of files over 4GB I would like to put on the router's hard drive. My question is can I format the hard drive to HFS+ and be able to read/write on my PC's through the network. All of my home computers are runing Windows 7 and the only apple products that I own are a iPhone 5 and origional iPad.

Windows 7

Posted on Sep 21, 2013 7:26 PM

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User profile for user: John Galt
John Galt
User level: Level 10
141,444 points

Sep 21, 2013 9:13 PM in response to Jordan843

Jordan843 wrote:

... My question is can I format the hard drive to HFS+ and be able to read/write on my PC's through the network.


Since the Extreme supports NTFS and FAT32 formatted volumes, it stands to reason that it should support PCs accessing an HFS+ formatted volume equally well, so answer is yes... up to "through the network", which is the only uncertainty.


Mediafour's MacDrive will read and write HFS+ formatted volumes, but ask them if your application - a drive connected to the Extreme - is specifically supported.


Another option is Paragon Software's HFS+ for Windows 10.

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User profile for user: Jordan843
Jordan843 Author
User level: Level 1
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Sep 22, 2013 9:31 AM in response to John Galt

Ok the problem is I am not interested in installing software to use the drives in HFS+. I have lots of computers and people bringing me their computers to work on. All the computers are windows based and I would like to be able to just map out the network drive to acess files quickly without having to install programs to make it work on every computer.

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User profile for user: Jordan843
Jordan843 Author
User level: Level 1
0 points

Sep 22, 2013 9:45 AM in response to John Galt

I think I just found what I was looking for on Wikipedia I know things can be edited on Wikipedia so can you verify this is corect?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort


It should be noted that although Windows does not natively support HFS+, an HFS+ volume on an AirPort Disk can be easily accessed from Windows. This is because the SMB/CIFS protocol used to access the disk, and hence access from Windows is filesystem-independent. Therefore HFS+ is a viable option for Windows as well as OS X users, and more flexible than FAT32 as the latter has a 4 GiB file size limit.


What is SMB/CIFS protocol? This would allow it to work without added software right?

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Airport Extreme and Windows

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