Why Leopard’s Time Machine Doesn’t Support AirPort Discs

This explains why Leopard’s Time Machine does not support Airport disks.

This makes perfect sense. Airport buffers the data in memory before writing it out to the drive to speed up the operation from the application’s point of view. This kind of feature is pretty common in disc storage system.

I am still disappointed that Apple chose to use USB as opposed to FireWire for Airport discs. I ran a number of benchmarks a while ago and found that while the performance was ok, it could have been a lot better.