I had a little more time to play around with the USB drive interface on the new Airport Extreme and found out some more interesting stuff.
The Airport Extreme will respect any RAID options set up in the external drive cabinet itself. I set the drives to RAID-0 (striped) on the board itself, reformatted the drive on my Mac and attached it to the Airport Extreme and the two drives are correctly seen as one and presented as one to the Mac.
I did run into some interesting issues when reformatting the drive with FAT-32, for some reason the Airport Extreme would reboot everytime I tried to mount the drive from my Mac, not a show stopper, but strange indeed.
I tested using aliases to remount the drive when Airport was turned off on the Mac. In my previous post I described how the drive on the Airport Extreme could only be seen by the Mac if Airport was turned on even though the Mac was connected to the Airport Extreme via ethernet. If you create an alias of the drive on the Airport Extreme, you can double-click on it to reconnect to the drive even if Airport is turned off on the Mac.
Updated - I am now able to see the drive without turning Airport on, for some reason I could not before.
