AirPort Utility 6.x: Share a USB hard disk on your network

Share a USB hard disk on your network

If your base station supports it, you can connect a USB hard disk to the USB port on your base station, and computers on your network (both wired and wireless) can connect to it to access, share, and store files and data.

Note: If you’re using a Time Capsule, you don’t need to connect an external USB hard disk. Time Capsule comes with an internal AirPort disk.
  1. Plug the hard disk into the USB port on the back of the base station.
  2. Open AirPort Utility, located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder, select the device you want to set up, and then click Edit. Enter the password if necessary.
  3. Click Disks.
  4. Select Enable File Sharing to allow users to share files on the disk, and “Share Disks over WAN” if you want to provide remote access to the disk over the WAN port.
  5. Choose With Accounts from the Secure Shared Disks pop-up menu if you want to secure the disk using accounts. Choose With A Disk Password or With Base Station Password if you want to secure the shared disk with a password.
  6. If you choose to use accounts, click Add (+), and then enter a name and password for each user who will access the disk, Choose “Not allowed,” Read only,” or “Read and write” from the File Sharing Access pop-up menu to assign guest access to the disk.

If you connect a USB hub to the base station, you can connect multiple hard disks to it, and access them from the wireless network.