David’s Opinions

I’ve got 2 x USB hard drives connected to my AEBS and the Airport has disk sharing configured with user accounts.
I found an issue the other week… I thought I’d backed up my data to my “personal drive” on the AEBS… only now the drive had nothing in it!

Turns out that the AEBS (had been restarted at some point) and was now presenting my personal drive off the “other” hard drive…

I’ve been searching for an explanation on this tonight and while I’ve not been able to find anything on the web, I eventually ran help in the Airport Utility

AirPort Extreme (802.11n): Using an attached USB storage device as a home directory is not recommended

You should not use a USB storage device connected to an AirPort Extreme (802.11n) base station as a home directory. An AirPort Extreme (802.11n) base station may not be able to locate a home directory on an attached USB device if it is powered off or if the enumeration order of attached storage devices changes.

Article: 305013
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305013

So… if it’s not recommended to set up the AEBS in this way, why allow the option in the configuration? Oh and how many people are going to understand what the word enumeration means anyway?