Airport Extreme and External Hard Drives

Trouble Ticket


Type Network Platform WIN/MAC OS XP, 7, Leopard

Date 23-Nov-08 Application Airport Utility Hardware Airport Extreme BS, Seagate FreeAgent Desk

Category Software Level Easy Time Taken 20 Min.



Description
Using an Airport Extreme Base Station on a multi platform network with 2 external Hard Drives attached via a USB hub. On the windows network hard drives would lose connectivity after a certain time and would not reconnect without rebooting the router.






Cause
Hard Drives had built-in software that determined sleep modes after a specific time frame. Apple Airport Extreme Base Station (as with most apple products) do not like drives being removed without ejecting the disk which the AEBS does not support.





Solution
Disable Sleep / Power Save modes on the external Hard Drives.


How To
Step 1 - Install the SeaGate FreeAgent Desk software on any computer.
Step 2 - Plug in the hard drives to the computer with FreeAgent software installed.
Step 3 - Open the software and locate the setting for sleep / power save modes.
Step 4 - Change the settings for turning off the hard drive to Never or Disable.
Step 5 - Save the changes.
Step 6 - Connect the hard drive(s) back into the AEBS.
Step 7 - The hard drives should no longer turn off eliminating network disconnection.



Total Cost 0.00