8TB Time Capsule Upgrade

[ThunderSkunk]

I wonder if anyone has tried using a 2.5" SATA SSD in an adapter caddy in one of these. The extra air volume in the enclousure left from teh smaller drive may mitigate the risk of heat death of the ssd somewhat, & with a bit of extra ventilation opened up as well. Since those are up to 4TB, that might make for an interesting itunes server that gets around the HD's being put to sleep every few seconds.

 

[regtor]

I wonder if anyone has tried using a 2.5" SATA SSD in an adapter caddy in one of these. The extra air volume in the enclousure left from teh smaller drive may mitigate the risk of heat death of the ssd somewhat, & with a bit of extra ventilation opened up as well. Since those are up to 4TB, that might make for an interesting itunes server that gets around the HD's being put to sleep every few seconds.

This should work but I would not expect it to be much faster than a spinning drive. FWIW, my 2013 Time Capsule and 4-year old 12TB WD Gold upgrade still working great, backing up multiple macs with no issues...

 

[rahim.mando]

I would like to report that I have successfully upgraded my 2TB AirPort Time Capsule (2013 Edition) to 8TB.

I used the newly released Seagate 8TB Archive hard drive (ST8000AS0002).

The hardest part was opening the Time Capsule itself. After that, the hard drive rubber support must be cut to accommodate the fatter HDD. The entire process took me about 2 hours.

7 years later... it still works, never had any issues. It is just too slow for 2022.
I also did a 12TB version, no issues as well.

 

[Nekomichi]

I upgraded my 2TB to 4TB 2,5" and I really enjoy the reduced noise and much shorter spin-up time. Should have done long ago.

Time traveller from the future here, I did something similar. Bought a 5TB portable Seagate Expansion and shucked it for the 2.5" drive inside for my 5th gen Time Capsule.

Spin-up time is much shorter, with the 3.5" drive it would previously take 15-20 seconds before the drive was ready, now it's 5-7 seconds.

Noise is also significantly reduced, the 3.5" drive would audibly spin up and I could hear it from across the room, now it's almost silent unless I put my ears next to the Time Capsule.

Transfer speeds have dropped a little but that's to be expected since the 5TB drive is 5400RPM as opposed to the 7200RPM 3.5" drive. With the original drive I was getting 38.4MB/s write and 51.5MB/s read while with the 2.5" drive I'm now getting 33.6MB/s write and 41.2MB/s read. This was tested using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test with a 2GB test load over Gigabit Ethernet, speeds were a little slower on 5GHz Wi-Fi and a lot slower on 2.4GHz. For smaller file transfers, the difference in speed is actually completely offset by the much faster spin-up time so overall it's still faster.

 

[udance4ever]

Hello space cadets! 👩🏼‍🚀 With the impending doom of our Time Capsules next year, I decided to start the process of replacing it with a NAS, transition to the backup Time Machine server on our iMac until the NAS is set up, and salvage the 2TB drive.

So somehow I ate all the Apple marketing, I could have sworn they put Enterprise grade drives in this unit (and our 2010 Mac mini server we bought at the same time). But I get it, it's really designed for light loads in a small home office (idle 80% of the time), not being hammered in a data center for 5 years 24/7.

Anyone have any luck extracting SMART info from the drive? I installed smartctl off Homebrew and have no issues getting SMART info off the internal drive on my MBP and off other external drives (eg. HGST Ultrastar 6TB). I assume they're all the same - I have a 2TB Caviar Green. I tried another USB-C to SATA dongle and no luck with either one - I get:

/dev/disk7 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk7
1: Apple_HFS APconfig 1.1 GB disk7s1
2: Apple_HFS APswap 1.1 GB disk7s2
3: Apple_HFS Data 2.0 TB disk7s3
% sudo smartctl -a disk7
Smartctl open device: disk7 failed: Operation not supported by device

Insanely curious to see what the stats are after being served 16 years! (ChatGPT says I am now in "bonus time" w this drive lol)

Are there any clever uses of the device now that it is EOL in a year?

 

[haralds]

I had to retire my Time Capsule 4th gen, which had been upgraded to 10 TB in 2020. It had been running since 2012! Tahoe no longer supports them. I ended up getting a second, identical 10 TB, and installed both of them in a Synology DS223j. I added a 5Gbps USB Ethernet adapter to my 10Gbps hub. TimeMachine is now more than twice as fast as before. It routinely serves 5 Macs. I have a larger Synology NAS with a 100TB storage pool on 10 drives, which I don't run all the time. I use that as a secondary backup.
The drives are configured as RAID 0, formatted with BTRFS. The drives are Enterprise-rated, so I expect a long life. There is some recovery with BTRFS, but the best is to have system redundancy.
I also added an external 10TB USB 3 to the DS223l for CCC images. It is running close to the directly connected speed, but since this is in the background, the actual speed is not a concern.
Next, I have to tackle offline storage at a reasonable price.