Time Capsule as a mass storage device

[derbyphil]

Could anyone help me with my little question....

Can the Time Capsule be used as a mass storage device as well as a way of backing?

is so, how?

 

[Roy Hobbs]

Could anyone help me with my little question....

Can the Time Capsule be used as a mass storage device as well as a way of backing?

is so, how?

It mounts as a hard drive you can do what you want with it

 

[pyrodex]

It mounts as a hard drive you can do what you want with it

Will TC remove non TC files on the drive? If you have a AEBS with say a 1.5TB Drive and lets say you put a 1.2TB partition and a 250GB~ partition on the 1.5TB and use AirDisk. Could airdisk show both drives over the Air or just one?

 

[craig1410]

The only thing you should bear in mind is that it is not designed to be a high performance file server. For example, it is designed to spin down the hard disk when it is not actively in use so you do sometimes get a 2 or 3 second delay when you access it again. Also, the data transfer rates are not brilliant so don't expect it to rival a USB2 or FW connected external disk.

As long as you are planning to use it for non-performance-critical storage or backups then it is great but I wouldn't want to use it for anything which required high data transfer rates. I have a 500GB TC which I use to backup my iMac via the gigabyte ethernet port.

Cheers,
Craig.

 

[craig1410]

Will TC remove non TC files on the drive? If you have a AEBS with say a 1.5TB Drive and lets say you put a 1.2TB partition and a 250GB~ partition on the 1.5TB and use AirDisk. Could airdisk show both drives over the Air or just one?

If you mean will Time Machine (TM) remove non TM files on the disk then, No it won't. When you set up TM to use a TC disk it just creates what's called a sparse bundle on the disk. In effect this is just a big file which contains the backup content for your machine. Multiple machines can back up to the TC because they each get their own sparse bundle. The remainder of the space on the drive is available for use for iTunes libraries or backups from Windows machines or whatever you wish.

I can't answer your question about the AEBS as I only have a TC and I just set it up as a single partition.

Cheers,
Craig.

 

[derbyphil]

Thanks, ill look into it a bit more, i could not see it mounted as a hard disc, im guessing it would work better if connected to the mac with a LAN cable.

Im not planning to use it permeant as a mass storage device its just a temporary one till me new external Hard Drive comes

Thanks

 

[craig1410]

Thanks, ill look into it a bit more, i could not see it mounted as a hard disc, im guessing it would work better if connected to the mac with a LAN cable.

Im not planning to use it permeant as a mass storage device its just a temporary one till me new external Hard Drive comes

Thanks

Have you misunderstood or am I misunderstanding you? What he was saying is that it appears as if it is mounted as a hard drive - but it is physically connected either via an ethernet cable or via a wifi network. Mine is connected to my iBook via wifi and my iMac via ethernet but it appears on both in finder as if it was a hard drive.

I hope that clarifies,
Craig.

Edit: To give you an idea of ethernet (cable) performance, I can copy 650 megabytes of data in a single file (CD image) to my TC from my iMac in 46 seconds. This equates to just over 14MB/sec which isn't bad but is several times slower than my USB2 Lacie 250GB external drive which only takes 12.4 seconds for the same file which is 52.4MB/sec. Note that transferring many smaller files would be a good bit slower since you will have more network round-trips.