Share a USB Hard Disk Using Your AirPort Extreme

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!