Any opinions on the wifi time capsule unit?

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Weaksauce
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Sep 17, 2010
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I am looking into backup stuff for my system I am purchasing. I came across Apples time capsule that is wifi and does the updates through that.

Any opinions? I would imagine its slow as poo? If so, what good is it? There is nothing more annoying than going to open a file then waiting for the HD to turn on.

Thanks
 
It's not slow, but Time Machine backs everything up transparently in the background so you probably wouldn't notice much even if it were slow. I've never had to wait for it to load or anything like that. When I recover files from Time Machine, the interface and file transfers work as well as if I was using a USB drive, just slightly slower if over WiFi.
 
I used it like a nas plus router. But I do appreciate having all of my media and music "floating" so that my wireless devices have access to it.
 
The internal disk is no where near as fast as it could be. With gigabit and a WD Green drive it could be much better. The big anandtech review covers this pretty well. Still it is far faster than the previous generation. With a PC on gigabit to the TC you would think the disk in the TC is the limiting factor but that isn't the case for some reason. I only use it as a network share with my PCs, I have no macs.

The power supply in the TC has had a historically high failure rate due to heat. Feeling the huge amount of heat coming off the current gen one I don't see that this is fixed yet. When it dies it is a medium difficulty repair to replace the cooked caps or a fairly easy mod to replace the internal power supply with an external power supply and solve it forever.

As a wireless router it is likely one of the best you could possibly get, tops the cisco E4200 even.

It has no web configuration page, this is a big down side as far as I am concerned. But now that they have an app for the iphone/ipod/ipad it isn't as bad as it was. Has always been an PC/mac application to configure it, which works well and is easy to use. Another potential down side is pretty much any little change requires a reboot of the whole thing. Want to add a port forewarding rule? That's a reboot.
 
Of note if you plan to use the USB port and AirDisk for an external or SAS like a drobo it is unbearably slow. You probably won't get more than 5mb/s.
 
The Timecapsule is good maybe a bit pricey, but clean if you don't want a datacenter in your home. :) If you are on a mid-range budget, I recommend an Airport Extreme and a USB external hard drive directly connected to the AirPort Extreme. If you want to do a little more with your storage skip the backup at your router and add a small NAS like a QNAP. They support Time Machine backups plus lots of other things.

Oh and don't worry about the speed, it will backup in the background and you probably won't even notice it. If it does bother you, hit stop backup and it will resume later automatically.
 
I love mine. I have the original 500GB but I put in a 2TB HDD in it. Works flawlessly and I've never had a problem. The only backup that takes a while is the initial. I recommend hooking your MacBook to it via Ethernet and have it run overnight. Works like a charm and will be finished by morning.
 
I have a Airport Extreme Base Station w/ 2 1TB drives hooked up to it via USB. I also have a FreeNAS box that does all the serving of my media, etc. The AEBS with the drives does just fine for Time Machine backups and I couldn't be happier. As others have said I probably wouldn't use it as my main file server since the FreeNAS smokes it but for TM, it works great. I like the fact that I can replace the drives or hook them directly up to my machine whereas if a drive dies in a Time Capsule, you're out the router AND the drive till you get it repaired/replaced.
 
My only complaint with it, is "all your eggs in one basket". That has always made me nervous.

But I would only use it for time machine (and to be honest, I have a firesafe mounted external that I use for that anyways, so I don't have one).
 
I'd say that it is a clean solution that...can easily be beaten. Honestly, your best bet is to buy a cheap NAS box that is compatible with Time Machine and just plugging that into an Airport Extreme, if you want external storage, or a USB drive to an Airport Extreme. I see no reason why anybody would want to buy a Time Capsule, quite frankly.
 
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