Airport Extreme USB Drive - Part III

I did not mean to have a part III, like most movies, one sequel is enough, but I was asked to run some benchmarks by Mike at xlr8yourmac.com after I sent him an email about drive performance on the new Airport Extreme.

You can review the benchmarks here.

What in interesting about the benchmarks is that while there is a wide disparity between accessing the drive when it is directly attached to a Mac (via USB, FW400 or FW800) and accessing the drive as a mounted volume when it is attached to the Airport Extreme, there is not much disparity between accessing the drive over ethernet or Wifi when it is attached to the Airport Extreme. That would suggest that the bottleneck is the Airport Extreme, rather than the network.

He was also very interested in movie playback performance. I tried three movies, all Apple Ads, all H.264 Decoder, 848 x 480, Millions, AAC, Stereo (L R), 44.100 kHz, two with a data rate of around 825 kbits/sec and one with a data rate of around 1530 kbits/sec. I ran the playback both over ethernet and Wifi. Both movies played without stutter or dropouts, and the frame rate was sustained throughout the playback.

I was not able to test simultaenous access from multiple macs, but my swag is that 3-5 macs can be supported depending on the movies.