The latest Apple update for the 802.11n Airport Extreme now allows attached USB drives to be used as Time Machine backups.
This was always a disappointing non-feature of the 802.11n Airport Extreme that though you could share a USB drive wirelessly, you couldn’t use that same drive for your Time Machine backups.
It was especially disappointing as it had been mentioned in a lot of the build-up to Leopard.
Apple’s new Time Capsule did allow that functionality, and a lot of people were disappointed that still the 802.11n Airport Extreme did not.
This update fixes that and now you can.