Share a USB Hard Disk Using Your AirPort Extreme

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Posted April 29, 2008 at 1:11am by iClarified

These are instructions on how to connect and share a USB Hard Disk using your AirPort Extreme Base Station.

Step One
Connect the hard disk into the USB port on the back of the AirPort Extreme Base Station.

Step Two
Launch AirPort Utility from the Applications:Utilities folder.

Step Three
Select your Base Station from the list on the left then click the Manual Setup button.

Step Four
Click Disks in the toolbar.

Step Five
Click to select the File Sharing tab.

Step Six
Make sure Enable file sharing is selected.

Choose With a disk password, or With base station password if you want to secure the shared disk with a password, or choose With accounts if you want to secure the disk using accounts.

Choose Not allowed, Read only, or Read and write to assign guest access to the disk.

Select the Share disks over Ethernet WAN port checkbox if you want to provide remote access to the disk over the WAN port. If you do share disks over the Ethernet WAN port you can also select to Advertise disks globally using Bonjour.

Finally set the Workgroup and WINS Server for Windows File Sharing if you choose to do so.

Click the Update button to complete your changes.

Step Seven
AirPort will need to reboot the Base Station to continue. Click the Continue button.

Step Eight
Your USB Hard Drive will now be mounted as a Share Point in OS X!

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Todd - November 5, 2012 at 6:31pm

My Airport is pleasantly sharing my usb drive. How can I get my mac to spotlight index this drive. I have found terminal commands to index but can't get the name right. Any Help?

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Taslim - September 5, 2012 at 5:56pm

Can a hard disk shared with airport extreme accessed from apple tv on same network...?!

Tchinam - September 2, 2012 at 3:45pm

Si je pouvais utiliser cette station comme appel tÃ©lÃ©phonique ce serait bien.

Sebastian - February 9, 2011 at 4:47am

I can only get mine to work with fat32 formated hd. Not with the mac os format is it just me or does the exteeme only do fat32?

David - August 30, 2009 at 2:40am

Step Four: Click on Disks on the toolbar. Disks does not show up on my Airport Extreme utility.

Jay - March 12, 2009 at 10:54pm

Can you clarify on the "enter workgroup and WINS server information if you choose to do so"? I have an AEBS connected to an HFS+ WD My Book. I'm able to connect to it over a WAN with my macbook. However I'm having trouble connecting to it on the PC's at work. I was wondering what to enter for the workgroup and WINS server. After that what steps do i take on the PC to connect to it? Is it through the "My Computer --> Tools --> Map Network Drive" or something else? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Jenna Hughes - June 27, 2009 at 2:11am

Jay, I've had an Airport Extreme for two weeks now and have never gotten the drive sharing feature to work with Windows--it just won't show up no matter what I do. The device and its instructions are obviously slanted toward Mac users--a page of detailed instructions for a Mac and a short paragraph for PC's. I'd like to meet someone who actually got this to work with a Windows PC, if there is any such person.

Jay - June 30, 2009 at 3:58pm

Jenna, Have you tried using the disk that comes with the AEBS? Supposedly if you install it on the PCs that are connected to your AEBS you should be able to share the drive with them (not sure if the formatting of the drive affects things), but my question relates to getting to my drive from the internet from a computer at work (i.e. can't install anything on the PC to get it to read the drive). Any help from anyone out there on how to access the airdisk from a PC that's not on the local network would be much appreicated.... J

Lars - July 29, 2009 at 4:56pm

Hey Jay I am desperately trying to get exactly what you are talking about here working! And no succes yet! Just wanted to hear, wether you have been succesfull in figuring this out!? Would be greatly appreciated if you could help me out here!

Jay - July 29, 2009 at 5:38pm

Hey Lars, I've been able to access my external harddrive from the internet, but on MACs ONLY. To do this you have to go through the settings and make the disk avaliable through the WAN and also go to dyndns.com and setup a hostname, you should then be able to run dyndns's tool to update your hostname to be linked to your router's ip address. After that from any Mac, make sure you're in finder and the top menu bar should have a "go" option, click on that and then click on connect to server and type in "afp://" followed by your hostname. It should then ask for your password (or not, depending on what setting you've selected in the airport extreme router's settings). After you enter your password, it should connect (it does for me and many of my friends are very grateful to have a "server" for them to use from anywhere at anytime). However, this only works from a mac, i have yet to figure out how to access this from PC... if you or anyone out there has any ideas on how to access my "server" on a PC i would be greatly appreciative... J

kincas - January 12, 2009 at 6:57am

"Step Eight Your USB Hard Drive will now be mounted as a Share Point in OS X!" It's not automatic. You have to "mount" that drives in "Go--> Network--> " and then sellect the drive.

kincas - January 9, 2009 at 6:53am

And with a powered USB HUB to connect also a printer ou more than one HD? I can "see" the printer but the External HD didn't appear.

El Barouf - April 30, 2008 at 10:06am

My mistake, I thought the share was in the shared list, which would have been in the LAN. I recon now. I don't understand why it doesn't work for me, unless there's port filtering on my provider side. Will investigate since I've done all as you guys did to no avail.

iClarified - April 30, 2008 at 12:30am

@El Barouf, actually this tutorial was performed over a WAN (Wide Area Network). If you notice the option is checked to Share over Ethernet WAN port.

El Barouf - April 29, 2008 at 4:55pm

That's clearly over a LAN. What about a WAN (Wide Area Network)? Anyone succesfully shared and accessed over the internet? I tried to no avail using both Windows and Mac machines, using samba and AFP as well. Any clue?