I recently purchased the Orbi system and loving it so far. It is so much faster and more reliabe than my previous Apple Airport system, which was an Extreme router and a couple Expresses extending the signal around my house. Night and day difference. The only short-coming is that the Orbi's USB port can't read an external hard drive. Since I use Time Machine to back up my computer and store all my old big files, this was a problem I needed to overcome. The solution I have found is to repurpose my Extreme router to a "bridge" setting and plug that in the LAN port of an Orbi satelite. Then, I plugged my USB hard drive into the Extreme. Works perfectly! I am able to automatically back up my computer using time machine and can even remotely access all my files on the hard drive. This isn't an elegant solution and certainly not one you would build with new components, but it turned out to be a good way to re-use my hardware and not buy anything new. Just thought I would share in case anyone else is stuggling with this problem.
Here is the link I used to help me figure out the settings on the Extreme. Btw, I did it over wifi and didn't connect it directly to my computer to make the changes. Work fine.
