NAS: Airport extreme vs. router + USB storage

There is no one right answer.

Although AC wireless has now been around 6-8 years.. The AC airports are now 4.5 years old.. which makes the design 5 years.. their major issue is just price vs functionality.

There are plenty of newer wifi standards.. the reality is client devices for the most part are still mostly one stream (iPhone) two stream (iPad) or three stream (Macbook, iMac).. which is well contained in AC wifi standard. The issue is much more how to get wifi to the device.. ie Apple has just started selling Linksys velop mesh devices.. But IMHO it is far from the best and if you can afford to .. and own your own house then wire it with ethernet and use lots of wireless AP.. eg Ubiquiti unifi.

For storage then I would say a NAS is a far better solution if you can afford it. Synology is an excellent choice in Apple environment.

A Time Capsule is not bad except for the limitations and limited service and lifespan. Its peak speed is less than half that of even a cheap NAS.

The USB is only 2.0 on all the airports and that seriously hinders the speed.. OK for small transfers but it is seriously lacking for larger files and network.

I am running an Asus RT-AC3200 with USB3 drive.. that gives me a transfer speed about the same as the TC.. it is a bit fiddly finding the right kind of USB.. at least if you want to use it for Time Machine.. but it has now been running TM for about 7 weeks without issues. Certainly the router is far more functional than Airport.. and that is old model.. you can get even better ones now.. but let me still say having a $400 router single point device is not as good as $450 distributed wireless ($250 main router and a pair of $100 AP.)

The reason to pay so much for the main router is to get something with decent USB3 disk speed and perhaps even esata on some models.

If data transfer performance is important to you, neither option will be satisfactory. In this case, your best option would be to consider getting a dedicated NAS device.

... and by dedicated NAS device, I mean a device that has its own computer/memory/operating system, etc. An example would be any NAS provided by Synology. FWIW, I have a Synology DS916+. I use it as a backup destination for both Mac & PCs, as a media server, and file storage. It can provide a number of other services as well as it is basically a very compact network server. This device has four internal drive bays, but you can add a 5-bay external enclosure if you need even more storage space.

I am running an Asus RT-AC3200 with USB3 drive.. that gives me a transfer speed about the same as the TC.. it is a bit fiddly finding the right kind of USB.. at least if you want to use it for Time Machine.. but it has now been running TM for about 7 weeks without issues.

Just to keep this updated.. and to ensure you don't make wrong decisions..

The hard drive plugged into the Asus is still running fine. Access from Finder working great.

But Time Machine stopped working a few days ago AND wiped out its backup.. AND posted no details whatsoever. I happened to check how my test TM was going.. and discovered it was dead.. looking back over logs discovered it was typical TM.

Since I use CCC now for my primary backup this was no problem.. I simply wanted to record TM behaviour to non-apple target.

Restarted the test.. TM created a new backup and has now run 5 days.. without issues... yet!!

it's unclear if you mean time capsule rather then airport extreme

I have an usb hd connected to my airport extreme and I have a synology nas connected to an airport express which extend the wifi network of the airport extreme

and then an usb ext hd connected to my mac which is my time machine backup (because it's soo much faster)