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Did you miss the whole SMR debacle?
Oh wow! I indeed did not know! Reading right now. I never ever had a single problem with mine, mine surely are the CMR versions. So I edited my recommendation, thanks for the info!
 
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Dang it. I don't know what the first drive was (it was whatever came in the Airport) but the replacement was a Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD. Of course I bought it Aug 13, 2020, so just outside of the warranty period.

But that's good to know, thanks for the reply.
Ironwolves and other similar enterprise/NAS drives like WD reds run hotter so it probably cooked inside that TC.
Toshiba is three.

There are three HDD manufacturers left.
Toshiba is part of WD now.

So there's only two.

Anyways all drives fail so redundancy is key, aside from outliers like that particular seagate 3TB model that failed like crazy back in the days. There's the classic backup rule: 3 copies of data, two separate media and one offsite at the minimum for anything you care about.

My main backup is a WD drive and it's replicated to 2x seagate drives.
 
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For a platter-based HDD, Toshiba or HGST.

Either 2.5" or 3.5" format (depends on what fits inside the Time Capsule).
Or... use it with an external enclosure. You might want one with an external "power block" as well.

or...
An SSD of your choice. Either a 2.5" SATA (would this fit right inside the Time Capsule?), or perhaps a "pre-assembled" drive like the Samsung t7 "shield".

How many Macs (and WHAT KIND of Macs) are you backing up?
Might a smaller dedicated drive for each of them work better?
 
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Thanks to all who replied. I'm leaning away from connecting anything to the Airport (seems like there could be compatibility issues) so back to deciding between opening it up again & replacing the drive, or just going with external USB drives for both computers.

I appreciate all of the replies and the direction they've guided me.
 
I won't buy HD ever again. I did buy this for new SSD.

Yes, you can put whatever you want in the enclosure, the point is to being able to access the disk easily if needed. In any case, given that it's for a backup use case, it does not matter much the speed. I would rather prefer cheap + big + slow (to have more historical data) than expensive + small + fast.
 
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Toshiba is part of WD now.

So there's only two.

I know there was a planned sale to WD, but I thought that fell through/was never completed.

According to this article from March, Toshiba is the third-largest global maker of HDDs, making up 20% of the market in 2022.

 
I have thought about it, but I'm not sure what type drive I would need (to be more specific, what SSD would physically fit fit into the Time Capsule enclosure & interface with the plug that is already in there). Opening the Time Capsule wasn't that bad, and I wouldn't mind doing it again ti move to an SSD. Not sure what a nvme drive is, but I'll google that.
I would get a known brand like Crucial or WD Blue SATA SSD. It "should" be plug and play, only thing is that these drives are 2.5" form factor and won't neatly fit/mount like the 3.5"(there are brackets to convert 2.5 to 3.5 but I wouldn't bother), but as the Timecapsule won't be moving around I think it's okay to let it sit in the compartment as is. I've been thinking about doing this to my Timecapsule but haven't had the time to do the operation yet. If you need larger than 2TB then you will need to use a nvme drive and a sata to nvme adapter, something like this:

sata to nvme adapter
 
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I would get a known brand like Crucial or WD Blue SATA SSD. It "should" be plug and play, only thing is that these drives are 2.5" form factor and won't neatly fit/mount like the 3.5"(there are brackets to convert 2.5 to 3.5 but I wouldn't bother), but as the Timecapsule won't be moving around I think it's okay to let it sit in the compartment as is. I've been thinking about doing this to my Timecapsule but haven't had the time to do the operation yet. If you need larger than 2TB then you will need to use a nvme drive and a sata to nvme adapter, something like this:

sata to nvme adapter
Thank you! That was super helpful. Sounds like the conversion to SSD wouldn't be too bad. I appreciate the explanation of what would be needed and the link to the name driver & the adapter. I think I may end up going this route. It's nice having everything self contained in the Airport & with the SSD it won't make any noise (like the HD did). Tnks again for the h
 
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I would get a known brand like Crucial or WD Blue SATA SSD. It "should" be plug and play, only thing is that these drives are 2.5" form factor and won't neatly fit/mount like the 3.5"(there are brackets to convert 2.5 to 3.5 but I wouldn't bother), but as the Timecapsule won't be moving around I think it's okay to let it sit in the compartment as is. I've been thinking about doing this to my Timecapsule but haven't had the time to do the operation yet. If you need larger than 2TB then you will need to use a nvme drive and a sata to nvme adapter, something like this:

sata to nvme adapter

This is a 4 TB WD Blue SATA drive. I'm assuming I could use this without the need for the name to sata adapter, but wanted to double check here first, as I don't really know the ins & outs of this:

If this does work, as a follow up question, would it make sense to get something like this rather than an name drive & adapter, or better to get the name, or it doesn't really matter?

Thanks in advance.
 
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To replace the internal HDD in the timecapsule? should work great and improve performance/reliability too

I like the idea of a SATA native drive than a janky adapter for that purpose too
yup, to replace the time capsule internal drive. Thanks for the confirmation.
 
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For Movie, TV and data files the Mac mini has 3 OWC ssd drives that project to the apple TV without a hitch.
For Time Machine ,the Mac mini and MBA each have a NVMe 500 WD blasé since they get used once a month.

hope this helped!
 
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