Anyone have the latest time capsule? TC vs a true NAS drive?

[fluidedge]

I'm looking for some kind of NAS type thing that I can access anywhere over internet in a personal cloud type device. I've been looking around and there seem to be quite a lot of options with mixed reviews, then I came across the spec for the time capsule and it seems like it ticks all the boxes I need. It would be nice to have an upgraded 802.11ac spec router to replace my aging n router.

Is the time capsule worth it? Refurb prices seem ok to be honest.

How does this stack up against a true NAS drive that might have a bit more brains in terms of adding torrent clients, web interfaces for accessing media etc.

How do you access the time capsule across internet? Does it just appear as a hard drive in Finder?

 

[Altemose]

@fluidedge The Time Capsule is fantastic and does a great job at what it does. The Time Capsule supports standard AFP access over WAN as well as Back to my Mac VPN functionality which works great! You would be looking at speeds between 20-30 MB/s when connected on a LAN to the Time Capsule.

 

[MCAsan]

Realize that TC was designed to be the device that Time Machine uses for system backups. It was never designed as a general purpose NAS for multiple machine access ...etc.

 

[Weaselboy]

How does this stack up against a true NAS drive that might have a bit more brains in terms of adding torrent clients, web interfaces for accessing media etc.

Like MCAsan said, the Time Capsule is really primarily designed as a Time Machine backup target and is a pretty lousy NAS device. The data access speeds are slow and the features are very very limited. If you want NAS features, you will be much happier with a real NAS device.

 

[ColdCase]

NAS devices are also slow, unless you go top shelf. If you are in the top shelf territory it is much easier and much less limiting to use something like a mac mini (or spare Mac) with a bunch of drives attached and running the OSX server app. You will be much happier, I know I am. There are also much fewer security vulnerabilities than your typical NAS. Synology has had a few scares.

Otherwise a TC will remote access as well as the average NAS device. Plenty of folks use them for that purpose.

 

[Altemose]

Even an AirPort Extreme for $129 refurbished from Apple and a 2 TB USB hard drive will do the job well and you can easily partition the drive as well!

 

[fluidedge]

all good advice, thanks guys, I'll keep looking at proper NAS solutions I think.

 

[Altemose]

The AirPort Extreme and USB drive may be enough for your needs.

 

[zettabyte]

NAS devices are also slow, unless you go top shelf. If you are in the top shelf territory it is much easier and much less limiting to use something like a mac mini (or spare Mac) with a bunch of drives attached and running the OSX server app. You will be much happier, I know I am. There are also much fewer security vulnerabilities than your typical NAS. Synology has had a few scares.

Otherwise a TC will remote access as well as the average NAS device. Plenty of folks use them for that purpose.

Very true. I am dealing with this issue right now with my slow WD My Cloud 4TB NAS, which is very bottom shelf. Heck it's basement shelf...VERY SLOW...no matter how fast your internet connection is or whether it's connected via the best of the best connections, which I have, it's slow and pretty much worthless for remote access.

Advice: DO NOT GO WITH THE WD MyCloud (the ones with the white case) NAS drives. If you can afford it, go with nothing less than the WD My Cloud EX2 or EX4. Next up is the EX2100 and EX4100 Series. From there the DL2100 and DL4100 are fantastic choices.

 

[Crazy Badger]

My view is that for anything more than 1-2TB of storage, that you could quite easily get by plugging a USB3/Thunderbolt drive into your machine, and especially when you're sharing across multiple machines a NAS is the right direction to be looking.

For around £500 you could build a pretty powerful FreeNAS solution with ~8TB of storage that will pretty much outperform any of the dedicated NAS boxes (Sinology, QNAP, Netgear, WD, etc.) in that price range, and saturate a GB network connection (i.e. ~100MB/s).

FreeNAS is a fantastic platform for just file sharing, but opens up all sorts of further opportunities for using the NAS. Mine is running as a Media Server (Plex), Cloud Storage (ownCloud), DNS (unbound), VPN Server (openVPN) as well as running a number of Virtual Machines (Win 7, Ubuntu, Centos, etc.) for various applications.

The only downside is a fairly steep learning curve, but once you get over that it's a fantastic solution. And unlike running some of this stuff on my Apple iMac, it does genuinely 'just work'