I am looking into getting a wireless router that can handle an external USB HDD and printer, but the only thing I can find is the Airport Extreme from Apple.

Is there anything else on the market similar? I do not want a router with integrated HDD, and do not want to buy separate add-ons to handle a printer and a hard drive.

 

The Apple Time Capsule is pretty sweet... but it has a built in HD...

 

The airdisk capability of the airport extreme is crap, at best.

Not sure if Time Capsule will be any better, but it can't be any worse.

Printer support is driven by the printer's capability to support Rendezvous. SO i'd check to make sure that is something your device already has.

 

I like my Apple Airport Extreme -- just buy a USB bridge / hub and install Bonjour (and the hard drive installer) on any PCs you have. Bingo. Works like a charm.

I loved the first time I did wireless printing from my house. I thought I was living like the Jetsons ... Seeking files off the hard drive ... a little slow (probably due to the external drive being the bottleneck) but getting files from the common drive between computers ... a lot easier than lugging the portable drive from computer to computer when you're lazy or when my 2-gig Jumpdrive is too small.

I think I might need a dedicated drive to do my Time Machine backups ... doing the sync'ing like I do now is pretty tedious ...

 

Are you using the airdisk functionality? Or something else?

If it's airdisk, it's not the hard drive being the bottleneck.

 

AFP ftl.

 

Actually, airdisk is Samba which is rather confusing given Apple's AFP standard.

Regardless, it's still a steaming pile of dung.