# Airport Extreme not detecting External Hard Drive



## eurobass (Nov 1, 2008)

Hello all.

Maybe you can help with this this issue, because I'm just stuck.

I've been using my airport extreme base station for 3 months now....perfectly. 

I'm mainly using it to network my hard drives wirelessly. I have 1 internal casing that supports two 1TB drives that mount as 2 separate drives. This has been working properly for the past 3 months (through airport).

Recently I changed the USB drive that was connecting my drives to my airport. I gave it to a friend (besides the point) and switched to a shorter USB cable. At first I was able to see the drives and mount them half of the time. The other half of the time it would just time out while trying to connect.

Today I came home witha brand new gold plated USB and tried that...now my airport utility doesn't even detect the drives.

Note: These drives work fine when plugged into directly to my macbook pro.

I tried unplugging the base station for 5 minutes...no luck
Did a hard reset....no luck

I don't know where to go from here.

Ant suggestions?


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Do you have any thing else you could plug into the base station to make sure that the USB port on it is still good, like a printer? Also, are you using a cable that is nice and thick and shielded and rated for USB2 speeds and power?


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## eurobass (Nov 1, 2008)

Interesting now...I tried a USB flash drive and it worked. USB port on the airport is fine.

The USB cable that wasn't working was a Belkin gold plated USB 2 cable. I find this bizarre since it's a brand new cable. Anyway...I plugged in my short USB cable wahlah! It worked again!

So just to be safe...I plugged in the belkin one more time...no luck

I reverted back to my short one again and now it doesn't work anymore! arg!

I've noticed one more thing too. When I had my short USB plugged in (the one that I got to work), my transfer speed was very slow. Something that used to take 2 minutes when I had my original cable plugged in (the one I gave away) now takes 11 minutes...

hmm..


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

I would try another new cable, one that does say it is rated for USB2 speeds.


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## eurobass (Nov 1, 2008)

*A new symptom...*

When connected directly to my external, the drives detect perfectly, however, I'm transferring at 0.5-1MB/s which never used to be the case.

I'm positive I'm using a USB 2.0 cable (it's brand new). I've tried other cables as well. Could this be a problem with my external HDD casing?

This is the casing I'm using with two 1TB SATA HDD's
http://www.galaxymetalgear.com/products/3538_uep.html

Thanks!


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

That is USB1 speeds. Being all you have done is change the cable and the problem started, I still think the blame lies with the cable.


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## eurobass (Nov 1, 2008)

I know this may be getting off topic of the airport extreme, but now when I plug my external casing directly into my Macbook Pro, it's transferring at USB1 speeds as well. Should I take this up with the manufacturer or is this a common issue? All of my other drives work fine with the Airport and transfer at USB2.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

I would as long as you are using the same cable on the other drives and it works at the higher speeds. There could be something wrong with the controller on the drive.


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