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.