How to Access Hard Drives Attached to AirPort Extreme

By Chad Anderson

Network Attached Storage is becoming increasingly common as home media devices continue to be connected to the Internet for streaming media and file sharing. You can access NAS drives connected to an Apple AirPort Extreme wireless access point by mounting the remote share. Since modern file managers are built with file sharing in mind, accessing the remote shares is as easy a long as you know the IP address of your AirPort Extreme. If you do not, the IP address is listed under Gateway in your Network Settings.

Step 1

Launch a file browser window, usually Windows Explorer or Mac Finder.

Step 2

Type \192.168.0.5\share into the address bar, where 192.168.0.5 is the IP address of the NAS and "share" is the name of the share. Under Mac OS X, click "Go" followed by "Connect to Server" and type smb://192.168.0.5/share.

If you don't know the IP address of the NAS you want to access, you can run a utility such as AirPort Utility (Mac OS X) or AirPort Disk (Windows) to determine it.

Step 3

Enter any log-in credentials necessary to access the share.

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