How would you change Apple's Time Capsule?

Now that Time Machine's all buddy-buddy with AirPort Extreme's AirDisk feature, we can see the demand for Time Capsule sinking considerably. Still, Apple's own NAS drive / WLAN router combo has likely found its way into quite a few households, and now that you've had a chance to back up your life a couple times over, we're interested to see how you'd tweak things. Are you really pleased with the interface? Are transfers snappy enough? Want a little more freedom with how you're able to configure things? Would you rather it not function as a substitute for a portable stove? Let's be honest -- Time Capsule's a pricey piece of kit for what you get, so feel free to let Cupertino know exactly what's keeping you from being absolutely satisfied in every respect.

[Dave @ Mar 28th 2008 7:26PM]

Once again Engadget, way to go above and beyond by making up news for Apple when there is none

[Josh* @ Mar 28th 2008 7:39PM]

The "how would you change" tags lead to more than just apple products. I sure hope there was comparable whining!

[Flashpoint @ Mar 28th 2008 7:56PM]

Apple claimed the hard drive in this thing would be "SERVER GRADE".

It isn't. The makers claimed it was "Desktop Grade".

FAIL.

[fred @ Mar 28th 2008 8:25PM]

Now, dave, they have been pretty good about having a more diverse selection of news stories as of late. You have to give them credit for that?

[clak @ Mar 28th 2008 8:28PM]

@Flashpoint

Web site copy for the Seagate Baracuda 500 GB drive used in Time Capsule:

The Seagate® Barracuda® ES enterprise hard drive is the industry’s most reliable, highest capacity 7200-RPM hard drive for 24 x 7, multidrive, business-critical applications.

Web site copy for the Hitachi DeskStar 721010KLA330:

Suggested Applications: Internal and external storage for consumer computers * Networked storage servers * Extreme gaming machines * Video editing arrays

I don't know, sounds like server grade to me. It might not be the very best hard drives in their respective line-ups, but I don't see anything misleading about the drives that Apple went with. I have a suggestion for you, Flashpoint. Instead of regurgitating all the Anti-Apple FUD in the media (mostly by tech reporters with no background in tech), why don't you do some research on your own for a change?

[Ryan Block @ Mar 28th 2008 8:55PM]

Flashpoint, it actually is in Hitachi's "server grade" class. It's the lowest-end server grade hard drive they sell, the Deskstar E7K500. http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.8a3bc4482bf8cdd52d4fed26eac4f0a0/

[destruc @ Mar 29th 2008 1:11PM]

nas + ethernet x'fer speeds = )

[Piers Rippey @ Mar 29th 2008 3:01AM]

I don't know, Josh, there're only four Apple-related posts on the whole first page, including this one. And frankly I think there are more people interested in the Time Capsule than there are in the Everex gPC, for example.

[Matthew Arnold @ Mar 29th 2008 10:44AM]

Resistance is futile.

[Flashpoint @ Mar 29th 2008 12:48PM]

Clak


YOU ARE WRONG

According to Hitachi, the DeskStar is a desktop-grade drive, whereas their UltraStar is server-grade. Apple states that the same Hitachi DeskStar drives are found in their line of Apple Xserve servers and meet or exceed the 1 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) recommended for server-grade hard drives.

The DESKSTAR is in the Time Capsule.

[Nick M. @ Mar 29th 2008 8:12PM]

@Flashpoint

"Apple states that the same Hitachi DeskStar drives are found in their line of Apple Xserve servers and meet or exceed the 1 million hour Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) recommended for server-grade hard drives.

The DESKSTAR is in the Time Capsule."

Since the Deskstar meets Apple's requirements for a server-grade HD and is used in Apple Xserves, wouldn't it be safe to say that according to Apple the deskstar is server-grade.

Thank you for taking the time to prove yourself wrong.

[remmelt @ Mar 31st 2008 3:56AM]

Flash Point, read this: http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
Google has a LOT of drives. They've rounded up data on their performance and failure rates. Most of these drives are "consumer" grade.

From the conclusion:
"One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent
pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature
drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels."

What they're saying is that consumer grade drives aren't necessarily worse than server grade drives, even at Google's high usage. The thing you get for the extra money is a guarantee that it will work for a while longer than the other ones. And where I say guarantee, I mean educated guess.

Google's way with the disk: each machine has three (four?) straight consumer drives, each with a straight backup of the rest. No RAID. If one of the drives fails, it is replaced. Done. So much for "server" grade!

[Brian @ Mar 31st 2008 6:56PM]

According to the data sheet for Deskstar E7K500. http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.8a3bc4482bf8cdd52d4fed26eac4f0a0/

one of the benefits is "SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface, 300MB/s burst data rate for faster data access" Time capsule is nowhere near this speed.

[wasabi @ Mar 28th 2008 7:28PM]

haha. why not? apple is perfect!!! steve job is comparable to jesus

[Michael @ Mar 28th 2008 8:54PM]

at least someone finally admits it...

[Steven Ryland @ Mar 28th 2008 9:33PM]

remove brain. instert fanboy propaganda here.

[wasabi @ Mar 28th 2008 9:36PM]

haha yea i love sarcasm

[Steffen Jobbs @ Mar 28th 2008 10:58PM]

What sarcasm. Hey, now. This is a dude who "get's it." Truer words have never been said about Apple and Steven Jobs.

One way Time Capsule can be improved is to double the storage and halve the price.

Well, there might be even better way to improve Time Capsule, but you'd have to break the laws of physics and alter the space-time continuum in order to actually go back in time. I believe Apple will have all that figured out at the introduction of Time Capsule 2.0.

[Rowdehaj @ Mar 30th 2008 2:30PM]

At least we know Steve Jobs exists.

[Paul @ Mar 28th 2008 7:31PM]

Gets way too hot and kills bandwith while transferring files, plus you can't use it to stream music. Oh and you can't partition it or change the format of it, which is kinda dumb

[Shane Lloyd @ Mar 28th 2008 7:50PM]

1. temperature too hot
-True. But, what does it matter? It's not a laptop.

2. Kills bandwidth when transferring files.
-True. It would be nice if you could throttle bandwidth, or internet traffic could take priority.

3. Can't use it to stream music.
-True. But, neither can the Airport Extreme, only the Airport Express. Most people don't want to have this sitting on their TV. They'd get an AppleTV if they want to stream audio and video.

4. Can't partition it.
-True. It would be nice to be able to have a separate area for wireless files and separate area for backups.

5. Can't change the format.
-True. But, what would you change the format to? Time Machine relies on the advanced journaling of HFS+ in order to function. What do you want it to be, FAT32? No point, unless you could partition (see #4) and have a FAT32 partition as well.

[Jesse S @ Mar 28th 2008 8:15PM]

You can stream with any-other NAS...

[Shane Lloyd @ Mar 28th 2008 8:36PM]

@Jesse S

We're not talking about playing music files or video off of your Time Capsule drive onto your computer, of course it can do that. The original poster was talking about physically plugging in speakers or a TV right into the Time Capsule. I was pointing out how that was beyond the scope of the product, and that an Apple TV is what he is looking for.

I don't want to think about using the wireless access point, performing a wireless Time Machine backup, and streaming video at the same time given the current bandwidth limit of wireless communication.

[Abuzar @ Mar 28th 2008 11:10PM]

Then it's not streaming music is it? If you're physically plugging it in, then it's playing the music.

So did he mean "it can't Play music?"

[brock @ Mar 28th 2008 11:53PM]

so what, the airport express is some kind of mistake of Apple. streaming music doesn't require a TV, just a stereo that might be conveniently located. the point is while its low end portable airport has it, its high end doesn't while most of the market is getting those features.
Temperature does matter, it can affect the quality and longevity of the product. would you say the same about a desktop computer, because it doesn't sit on my lap.
Bandwidth is a BIG ISSUE. nuff said
and there is more then just apple developed formats out there that people prefer. already this can limit its demographic if there isn't support for this filesystem by the other 93% of the market. apple has like 7%(not checking), even less people use time machine. there is a whole world outside your apple environment like Windows, Linux and BSD. a router should be the last place apple throws proprietary software on.

[Shane Lloyd @ Mar 29th 2008 12:42AM]

@brock

Yes, but, this product is designed for people using Macs, specifically, Macs with OS X Leopard, more specifically Macs with OS X Leopard who have TIme Machine running. It's not designed for Joe Schmo with Windows XP. Sure, it will work as a NAS with Windows XP, and you can format the drive in a windows compatible format in that case. But, it's designed purpose is a backup appliance to work with OS X Leopard's Time Machine program. Time Machine uses OS X's journaled HFS+ file system to track changes to the file system automatically, hence the need for the target drive on the Time Capsule to be HFS+ formatted.

Finally, for all the jazz you say about formats, you should know that Apple can natively read and write FAT32 and read NTFS and others, while Windows wont even recognize the file system of the Number 2 is OS market share, so, please don't ramble about what's fair and such.

[Abuzar @ Mar 29th 2008 1:22AM]

No.2 OS market share is probably Linux not OSX. I don't know if they use the same file system or not.

[Shane Lloyd @ Mar 29th 2008 9:47AM]

@Abuzar

Haha. Oh that's classic. I thought Mac users were living in a dream world. OS X has 11 times the total, world wide market share than Linux. ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8 ). 7.46% versus 0.65%. Most consumer installs of Linux are going to use the EXT3 file system. OS X uses the HFS+ file system. Windows will not read either format natively. Windows doesn't play well with others. The point I was making is that, Microsoft doesn't even natively read or write the Number 2 (or Number 3, for Linux) file systems.

[Eddie W @ Mar 29th 2008 1:56PM]

I'm not economist, but isn't market share tied to sales rather than total users? Since Linux is open source and primarily free, I should think it would be difficult to figure out how many users there are, or what computers happen to be running what. Someone buying a computer with Vista preloaded and then switching to Linux would count as a Windows user for these purposes, I should think. I visited your link and I wasn't able to find a methodology behind the statistics, only the figures with a chart. Maybe I missed it.

[Shane Lloyd @ Mar 29th 2008 2:06PM]

@Eddie W

You make a good and valid point. That is why the only reliable way to determine true market share is to determine the operating system used by visitors to hundreds of the most popular websites on the internet. This is what Net Applications does. Their data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. You can read more about their methodology here: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

Note, that this is worldwide market share. If you want to go based on United States retail sales, then the Mac has over 14% market share in February 2008: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/17/apple_snags_14_percent_of_us_based_pc_retail_sales_in_february.html

[Gavin @ Mar 29th 2008 3:04PM]

Yes it gets a little hot, mainly when it's backing up.
I have 4 people using this thing and the bandwith is fine, no slow downs here.
Lots of streaming media, backing up and surfing, all far better than our previous setup.

[Abuzar @ Mar 31st 2008 12:36AM]

Shane, I'm not being ignorant. How do you track those numbers? Hell i can list charts too, but how do they know? Eddie it right, many people but Linux on their computers just because it's free. You can't buy many computers with Linux so you cant use sales Data to prove it. I still honestly think Linux is more widely used than Mac OSX.

[Josh @ Mar 28th 2008 7:32PM]

As much as I think it's a cool idea, it's absolutely worthless. Now that Apple has, finally, introduce time machine backups to air disks, it is much better for ANYONE to just get an external USB hard drive and an airport extreme. My point lies in this, what if you want to take your backup elsewhere and not lose your network? A cool idea, but worthless in the real world.

[Brandon @ Mar 28th 2008 10:28PM]

Time Capsule has an "Archive to external storage" button for copying your data to an external HD for offsite backup. It takes a few minutes, but I just set it to run on monday and then swap out the USB HD every friday.

[EagerDragon @ Mar 29th 2008 11:10PM]

Using TM over the Air Disk is not supported by Apple. This was enabled by mistake. Check all the documentation, there is no single place where it says is a feature. Call Apple and they clearly will also tell you it is not supported and that they never said it works.

[Josh @ Mar 28th 2008 7:31PM]

As much as I think it's a cool idea, it's absolutely worthless. Now that Apple has, finally, introduce time machine backups to air disks, it is much better for ANYONE to just get an external USB hard drive and an airport extreme. My point lies in this, what if you want to take your backup elsewhere and not lose your network? A cool idea, but worthless in the real world.

[Flashpoint @ Mar 28th 2008 7:58PM]

NO...this thing isn't worthless.

Apple's Hard Disk Drives in their iBooks and Mac Books SUCK.

I manage a mac lab and believe me, their hard disks fails so much it isn't funny. And before some asshat calls me out on Apple hate, go to some forums and see how many people's HDD's have failed in their laptops. I guarrantee you, its a big number.

[clak @ Mar 28th 2008 8:40PM]

@Flashpoint

15 % of the hard drives in all laptops fail within the first year. This has nothing to do with Apple. That's the nature of the beast. Hard drives were not designed to be moved around. Those spinning platters are very sensitive to movement, or don't you already know that? There's a reason why solid state drives are more reliable.

Flashpoint, how come your name is above all the stupid comments so far?

[Gilbert Tang @ Mar 29th 2008 4:29AM]

As someone who owns a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, an Airport Extreme, and several external hard drives, I was strongly considering a Time Capsule purchase. This is because I found it extremely frustrating that I had to plug in to back up every time, even though I had already been using AirDisk.


Needless to say, I was absolutely thrilled that Apple released the update allowing "regular" AEBS users to update wirelessly. Since, I've noticed two extremely frustrating things. First, for some stupid reason, my previous backups were not being recognized and I was being forced to start the whole process over. Second, having finally accepted this "do-over," I allowed the process to continue. However, I STILL have not been able to successfully backup 120GB on my MB and 82GB on my MBP without the process failing because the system is so unstable.

As a final issue--and quite possibly the biggest--the backups completely obliterate my internet connection, eventually resulting in the crashing of Firefox, and me having to relaunch my Finder. UNACCEPTABLE!

At this point, I haven't been able to back up since the updates came out, and once again I'm exploring other solutions, including *sigh* Time Capsule, even though I have all the necessary resources already at my disposal. Unreal.

[jim @ Mar 28th 2008 7:35PM]

Set up of the Time Capsule was easy. Wireless operation has been a problem with the connection dropping even though the distance from the computer is only 4 feet. The problem turned out to be my phone at 2.4Mhz wireless. In theory the TC is great. In practice it was poor. After over 2 hours on the phone with tech support they changed the channel that TC used. (Think it is now using channel 9 - not sure) That seems to have solved the problem but working through the problem has shaken my confidence in the technology. I had expected that it would have built in capability to deal with local interference. They should fix that if possible.

[mathewlavery @ Mar 29th 2008 10:57AM]

Unfortunately not too much you can do about the whole wireless phone situation (as far as I know). 802.11x only uses 2.4ghz and 5ghz, and about a dozen different channels within that spectrum. I scrapped my in house wireless phone a few years back in favor of my cell phone and have had very few WiFI issues since.

[peshue @ Mar 28th 2008 7:33PM]

I dunno, it seems pretty redundant now. Maybe combine it with apple tv? I'd guess it'l probably get killed off before too long.

[Tim @ Mar 28th 2008 7:40PM]

I would agree with this. It would make my setup way better.

[trev @ Mar 28th 2008 7:34PM]

It is freaking huge, so something smaller and cooler (literally) would be nice. Also having a faster interface such as FW800 or eSata instead of or in addition to the USB 2 would be a big plus.

[Shane Lloyd @ Mar 28th 2008 7:44PM]

What would be the point of a faster connection? You're connecting to it via Wifi. Even wireless N couldn't keep up with USB. Any other connection would be a complete waste.

Also, what does it matter how warm it gets? It's not like you have to have it sitting on your lap. It sits in the corner, away from everything else.

[trev @ Mar 28th 2008 7:59PM]

The point is that if you need to copy a big file in a hurry it would be very useful to simply plug directly into it. The simple addition of a FW800 or eSata port would make it much more versatile.

"what does it matter how warm it gets" Its not ideal for the drive, and if your using this to back up important data then surely you want it to be as reliable as possible.

[Aaron @ Mar 28th 2008 9:23PM]

Perhaps you missed the Google report that heat does not substantially correlate with drive failure, and only barely at extreme heat?

[dan g @ Mar 31st 2008 12:18PM]

The USB port is host-only, so you can plug only client devices into it (drives, hubs, printers) but not a computer.

FW800 is client-host, so you can plug anything into it (drives, printers, other computers). This is useful if you wish to use the TC as an external drive on your machine, to perform an initial backup or complete restore (which can be done much faster over FW800 than over the network)

[Jason G. @ Mar 28th 2008 7:34PM]

@Dave, I think the Apple coverage at Engadget is just fine. Don't go making up controversy when there is none.

Time Machine: I think it's a great idea for basic computing people, backing up with just a power cord, a few menu settings, and it happens automatically. Just needs to be a little cheaper. Maybe discount if bundled with a new computer (ala .Mac or printers).

Also, wish I could do first backup with USB cable, then have it write to that same backup afterward via Wi-Fi. Currently it makes two seperate backups. The first sync takes FOREVER, even over 802.11n.

[Shane Lloyd @ Mar 28th 2008 7:36PM]

You can make your first backup over gigabit ethernet - not as fast as Firewire or USB, but quite fast. Even 802.11n is fine, just let it run overnight. That's the thing - you just do it once, so, I'm not sure what the big deal is.