# Airport Exterme attached hard drive slow



## bitlord (Aug 27, 2009)

I have an issue when I trying to copy files to the hard drive(HD). It is very slow or times out.

I have a 1Tb HD attached to my dual band Airport Extreme. I am trainsfering files from my MacBook to the Airport Extreme HD with finder. The MacBook is conneted to the Airport Extreme with WiFi 5Ghz and LAN connection. The files I'm copying include directorys and files. The files are large like 3GB.
I gave the operation almost a full day to complete. Should take about 3hrs to copy all the files I have.

Info
I can connect to the HD with my Mac and PC.
Can copy files from HD to Mac or PC
The HD uses the router password for connection.
HD formated in FAT32 with one partition. 

What I have done to try to fix the proplem.
I have tried to copy smaller files like 350mb. 
I have rebooted the router.
Tryed to copy files with command line cp command

Is this common? Did I miss a step in setting up the drive?
I'm about ready to connect the drive drive to the Mac directly if I can't fix this.

Any help would be great thanks


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Aug 27, 2009)

Why is the drive in FAT32 format?  FAT32 cannot properly handle files larger than 4GB and has other naming limitations as well.

I would highly recommend backing up all the data on the drive and reformatting that drive as HFS+ (or "Mac OS Extended").  I think you'll see your problems vanish once this is done.

Once the drive is in HFS+ format, you'll no longer be able to connect the hard drive directly to a Windows computer (via USB or whatever) and access it, but you should be able to access it with a Windows computer just fine over the network (i.e., as a hard drive connected to your AirPort Extreme).


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## bitlord (Aug 27, 2009)

Thank you
It came out of the box formatted in NTFS.  I used My MacBook to format it. 
I formated it to fat so I could us it with my Mac, and use it to transfer files with Pc's . I was in an environment where almost all the other computers where PC laptops and the internet was not always available. I was using it as a thumbdrive.


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