Time Capsule needs to be reset about once a week...take to Apple?

Thank you for the update think ill book mine in.

dmk1974 said:

Well, it's been a while, so I thought I'd report back. I'm getting lockups where the wireless seems to go dead now about every 2 weeks (3 times now). The wired portion still works just fine though. I have to then pull the power on the TC, wait a few, and plug it back in.

I also am getting more frequent disconnects to the wireless HP printers. Not necessarily coinciding with the loss of wireless to all the other devices and computers.

I am seriously contemplating scrapping the TimeCapsule and going to a Netgear or something. Don't want to spend a fortune. Having an attached USB 3.0 drive will be fine for me (I backup the 2 MacBooks in the house over the network to a wire-connected Mac Mini). We'll see....maybe even another trip to the Genius Bar.

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My solution with Extremes and Time Capsules is to revert to the 7.6.1 firmware! My Extreme both under load and not under load would crash daily. Putting it to 7.6.1 made it rock solid. This particular Extreme handles an entire network of eight Expresses (roaming, hardwired in) with 105+ users. There may soon be an addition on the network too, but a new Extreme will replace the 5th gen. Just my two cents on what worked for me!

dmk1974 said:

I just downgraded mine to 7.6.1. Hopefully this will work, but if not, it's getting replaced for sure.

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I do not believe that all of these units are like that. Mine drives a 105+ client network.

dmk1974 said:

Haven't taken the TimeCapsule in to the Genius Bar yet, but I did pick up a Netgear R6250 router on Friday. Seems to be working very stable so far. I don't need to have a connected hard drive to the router, but would like one just for some extra storage and backups.

I have a 1.5 TB USB 3.0 hard drive that can connect to the R6250 3.0 port. I read I can also just disable the wireless on the TimeCapsule and then ethernet connect it to the R6250 (nice that it has a 4th port as opposed to the 3 ports on the TC). In real-use, which is faster and better to use?

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The Netgear is going to be faster since it has Wireless AC. Now if your devices can take advantage of it is a different story. Did you downgrade the TC to 7.6.1?

dmk1974 said:

Yes, I did downgrade to 7.6.1 (and still have it on that FW). I think only the 2013 MBA and rMBP have 802.11ac (unless the iPad Mini Retina does as well).

Just plugged the TC into the Netgear and turned the wireless off on the TC. Playing around with transfer speeds comparing to the Seagate USB 3.0 drive.

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That is definitely an option. Most any chipset in a router is not powerful enough to handle USB 3.0 speeds, let alone USB 2.0. It is kind of a gimmick in consumer grade routers to offer USB 3.0 but not allow users to take advantage of it. Try downloading BlackMagic Disk Speed Test from the Mac App Store to test speeds on the drives.

Altemose said:

I do not believe that all of these units are like that. Mine drives a 105+ client network.

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Yikes, it was definitely not designed to do that. You should really consider enterprise grade hardware.

brand said:

Yikes, it was definitely not designed to do that. You should really consider enterprise grade hardware.

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The only time I have ever maxed it out was when we had a 100 Mbps connection coming from the ISP. Sadly, we got downgrade to a 30 Mbps connection now.

My reasoning behind this was logical actually. I ended up buying a Cisco router (small/medium business class) which I do not recall the model number. I was then going to run the AirPort Expresses (2nd Gen.) in Bridge Mode. I figured, why not try putting the Extreme as the centralized system. Sure enough it worked and has never locked up like the Cisco did. I did get the Extreme replaced once by Apple for a failing antenna.

That says something about the standards that Apple makes its networking hardware to. The fact that it runs great on a 5th gen. Extreme shows me how much faster the 6th gen. would be once we either increase the load or get a better bandwidth package.

In the meantime, just to give advice, it really depends on the configuration. In my situation it was for a school so we have one network running for teachers and faculty and a BYOD network for students with just Internet access. It works beautifully and beat Cisco, Ruckus, and Aerohive out by a large margin on cost. Since this was my Eagle Scout project I wanted to make it affordable!

The only other option I was considering was Ubiquiti's UniFi. The problem I saw however was the fact that I could use the configuration of the server at the school. Changing the configuration and the way the network was "hooked up" was not an option, but the AirPort Extreme worked just fine when I tested it out. If we ever move to more bandwidth or more clients I will either replace the 5th gen. Extreme with a 6th and still have a centralized system, or set all of them to Bridge Mode and put a more powerful router up front. Either way, I have no complaints and we have pushed some Expresses to 45 clients on special occasions at the school.