Apple time capsule Review:
Apple time capsule is a revolutionary backup device that works wirelessly with Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard. Apple time capsule automatically backs up everything, so you no longer have to worry about losing your digital life. Apple time capsule is also a full-featured 802.11n Wi-Fi base station. Every computer in your house can work off a wireless network at blazing speeds. And they can back up wirelessly to the same Apple time capsule.

Mac users can use the Apple time capsule’s hard drive for basic storage as well, but they also get more benefit from Apple Apple time capsule than the Windows crowd, due to its interface with Leopard’s Time Machine feature. Time Machine lets you set automated backups from the Macs on your network directly to the Apple time capsule. It took about two hours to back up a relatively sparse 21GB of data on a Macbook laptop over a wired Gigabit connection to the Apple time capsule. Apple has also preset Apple time capsule to perform several backups a day for the first week you set it up, several backups a week after the first day, and then throughout each month, until you run out of drive space. Each backup only saves the information that’s changed, so you don’t have to do the complete multi-gigabyte data transfer every time. You can also tell Time Machine to back up manually whenever you want.

Apple boasts that Apple time capsule features a “server-grade” drive. When asked for a definition, the company said that it’s the same model of drive used in the company’s Xserve rack-mounted servers, operating at 7,200 rpm, and that the devices were designed for long periods of operation without the potential for failure. Almost all drives of this caliber should run for several years without failing, while most of these drives will last even longer.

However, drive lifetime is based on ambient conditions. If you use a Apple time capsule in a room that heats up, even the quiet internal fan in the device may not be able to keep the drive well within the defined tolerances. This decreases a drive’s lifetime and reliability. Xserves are typically used only in temperature-controlled server rooms and co-location facilities.

And even a fast drive is hamstrung by slow networking software. Apple time capsule’s AFP performance lags behind that of stand-alone Macs due to either inefficient server software or a sluggish processor, or both. A 1.07GB file took 40 seconds to transfer between two Leopard systems over AFP on a Gigabit network (about 200 Mbps), but the same file took 115 seconds to copy directly from a Time Machine backup folder to a Leopard system (about 75 Mbps). Once the Apple time capsule firmware update was installed, AFP performance increased to this rate, an improvement of about 25 percent.

Apple Time Capsule Features
This brings us to the Apple time capsule’s USB port. The Airport Extreme Base Station had one as well, so much of the functionality is the same. The idea is that you can plug pretty much any networkable USB device into the Apple time capsule and share it across your network. It can also accept a USB hub if you want to attach multiple devices. We successfully added a USB flash drive and a USB hard drive, each of which created another distinct drive volume on our network. Apple offers no RAID capability with the Apple time capsule (unlike the old Asus router-storage combo product), so it cannot mirror added drives or map them into a contiguous volume. Mirroring a drive already set to backup might be excessive, but it would be useful to create a single volume out of multiple drives.

In addition to adding storage, Apple also touts the USB ports for adding printers to your network. We were able to add a Canon Pixma ip2600 inkjet printer with no trouble, even over a powered USB hub that also had a hard drive connected to it. All of the various Mac- and Windows-based systems on the Apple time capsule’s network were able to print to it. We also installed a Wi-Fi-enabled Lexmark X7550 to the Apple time capsule’s network wirelessly. The Apple time capsule is not a print server, so if you send a job to the printer while it’s printing from another system, you’ll simply get an error message, instead of the Apple time capsule adding the new job to a queue. That’s to be expected, although it’s still a bit frustrating, as Apple makes a point to advertise the Apple time capsule’s suitability for network printing.

You should also not consider the Apple time capsule as a one-stop shop for your iTunes library across various systems, nor should you expect it to work with an Apple TV. In other words, a completely centralized Apple home media network is still out of reach. We were able to get an Apple TV onto the Apple time capsule’s wireless signal, but it would not find any of the iTunes libraries. Further, between the various account management pitfalls and the fact that you’re already presumably backing your iTunes library up to the Apple time capsule, its media file-management capabilities are also problematic. To be fair, Apple does not advertise Apple time capsule as a media server, although we hold out hope that it might improve the possibilities of Apple time capsule with a firmware or software update.

One thing we feared about the Apple time capsule when we first heard of it is that because it’s essentially a closed box, if the hard drive or the router fails, you end up losing both. It’s been shown that you can peel off the Apple time capsule’s rubbery bottom and remove the hard drive yourself, but Apple confirmed for us that even if you were to do that, you couldn’t treat the Apple time capsule as a standalone router, as the hard drive hosts vital data on it for the networking functionality as well. That’s another shortcoming, although Apple assured us that the Apple time capsule’s “server grade” Hitachi Deskstar hard drive would last a lot longer than the typical desktop or laptop drive.

Apple Apple time capsule User Review:

Since its introduction in January, Mac users (new and old) have been waiting patiently for Apple time capsules (TC) to start appearing in retail stores. For me - I got lucky and wandered into the Apple Store on Friday to find that they had actually materialized earlier in the day.

Getting the product installed into my home network was a little more difficult than I expected, but not terribly so. For me - the hang up was that I was not going to use the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) to share out my Internet connection. My goal was simply to turn this device into another client on my Cat6 home network. After installing the AirPort utility provided with the packaging onto my MacBook Pro, configuring Apple time capsule to recognize itself as a NAS only device was fairly straightforward. For at least the beginning, I disabled the wireless radio and plugged it in via one of its 4 available Cat6 connections. Opening config stuff was fairly standard: 1) give the device a name, decide on DHCP or manual IP config, etc. The only slightly annoying thing is that the Airport Utility does like to reset/reboot the Apple time capsule after you make almost any type of change to the configuration. Mine must have rebooted 8 times before I had made the last of my changes.

As far as the integration with Time Machine, it was very intuitive and straight forward. The only curious thing is that it will not let me change my TM preferences unless my laptop was plugged in. Strangely, I could perform an instant backup with the laptop running on battery power. As many people have wondered, you can attach another USB-based hard-drive to the TC and use that drive(s) as the source of the TM backups if you like. Doing so would essentially make the entire size of TC available as traditional NAS Storage. Plugged in via my Ethernet connection, the initial TM backup of my 160GG (40 GB used) hard-drive took about 2.5 hours. I assume the speed would be significantly reduced if I was using the wireless. It looks as though Apple creates a sparse disk image bundle on the Apple time capsule and then mounts that during a TM operation. This essentially leaves one file on the root of the hard drive after the initial backup is performed. You can mount this image at any time, and you will observe a folder structure similar to when Time Machine is operating against a locally attached USB hard drive.

Next the Wireless: After getting TM working to my satisfaction, I wanted to see if I set up another wireless network in my house. As with other AEBS units, this was very simple to do. I simply chose to put my TC into “Bridge Mode” and away I was. With 2 minutes I had a second wireless network up and running. For curiosity sake I setup the network to operate on the 5G Hz 802.11n configuration. I was curious to see how much faster the speed was than if I configured it to be backward compatible with 802.11a/b/g. Not surprisingly, performance on the “N” network was much better. I achieved average file transfers of almost twice the speed as I would have seen if I had been connected to my 802.11g network. Once I unplugged the Ethernet cable and went totally wireless, my Time Machine backups were very seamless and after a few hours of work, I stopped noticing the backups actually taking place.

Aesthetics: Like the AppleTV, the Apple time capsule device does get fairly hot to the touch. From a size comparison, it is a little bit bigger (height-wise) than the AppleTV. It does not however have the smooth edges that the AppleTV sports. For some reason, its exterior design is more reminiscent of the last generation of AEBS.

Overall, Apple time capsule is a great consumer device; but I have to believe that many power Mac users would cite SuperDuper’s (http://www.shirt-pocket.com) ability to perform backups to image files stored on a network share as a comparable feature set in a backup solution. Interestingly, I am using both backup strategies: Time Machine & Apple time capsule to protect the incremental versions of my everyday files and SuperDuper to generate a weekly backup image of my entire hard drive. My last comment would be this: a 500GB TC unit should be more than sufficient to take care of any single MacBook or MacBook Pro archiving strategy. If however you are looking to service multiple Macs or work with large amounts of video across the network, then the 1TB version will definitely be the way to go.

By John J. Schmitt

Compare Prices Of Apple Time Capsule