Time Capsule or Ext Hard Drive

[ChipRivers]

I live in a nearly wholey apple household with a number of iPads, iPhones, MacBooks, Apple TV etc.

I currently have an Airport Extreme as my wireless access point and I have been considering upgrading this to a Time Capsule to provide wireless storage and backup capability.

My question is, should I go for the Time Capsule or purchase an external hard drive to connect to my Airport Extreme?

If I go for a hard drive, will this provide the same functionality connected via the Airport Extreme? what type of hard drive should I go for?

 

[Weaselboy]

Do you have the newest, tower shaped Extreme? If you do just buy whatever USB HDD you find on sale and that will work just fine for Time Machine.

If you have the older, pancake shaped Extreme, it does not support the use of external drives for Time Machine.

 

[ColdCase]

^^ what he said

The older Extremes with one USB drive works well enough for a TM destination, but they are picky about drives and not as "robust" as a Time Capsule. If you have an older extreme, just replace it with a time capsule.

 

[Donfor39]

Do you have the newest, tower shaped Extreme? If you do just buy whatever USB HDD you find on sale and that will work just fine for Time Machine.

If you have the older, pancake shaped Extreme, it does not support the use of external drives for Time Machine.

ugh spac
I think I might consider a time capsule -may sell 3rd gen extreme and western digital external hdd -time machine has not been reliable enough for past 2 yrs

tonights backup has failed again due to not enough space-time machine is not deleting the old backups from this setup at all