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Time Capsule quandary

M

meistervu

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jul 24, 2008
1,027
27
I have a MBPr, and I am looking to replace my old router. At first was going to get an Asus AC router, but then for it occurs to me that for about $110 more I can get a 2013 Time Capsule to back up my stuffs. It doesn't sound like a bad deal if I look at it that way.

Then I look at the specs: 2TB, USB2, unknown throughput (older ones get 20-30MB/s). Not very impressive on the surface. In my past life I have built hundreds of machines, almost always with bleeding edge components.

But when I really think about it, this TC make sense and the "low" specs don't matter much. I am not looking for a NAS as it would be too slow for my photo library anyway, so USB3 on the TC wouldn't do me much good other than extending the backup capacity. I could probably put a 4TB drive in there when I need to in the future.

So I am leaning toward getting a 2TB TC and a 3TB Buffalo Drive Station DDR for my Lightroom photo library. Any thought?
 
The Time Capsule was not really designed for storage. Mainly backups which is OK with the low read/write speeds. I would look into a cheap NAS solution (Synology single bay with WD Red) or an external drive. Even if the TC had USB 3.0, it still would not perform as fast as the other solutions.
 
Did you read my post? Your response didn't make any sense to me as I wasn't planning to use the TC as a storage, hence my comments about the the "low" specs making no difference.

sick z33 said:
The Time Capsule was not really designed for storage. Mainly backups which is OK with the low read/write speeds. I would look into a cheap NAS solution (Synology single bay with WD Red) or an external drive. Even if the TC had USB 3.0, it still would not perform as fast as the other solutions.
Click to expand...
 
Apologize for that, I missed that one part of your post.

TC with the Buffalo DDR would be great. We sell them at work like crazy :)
 
meistervu said:
So I am leaning toward getting a 2TB TC and a 3TB Buffalo Drive Station DDR for my Lightroom photo library. Any thought?
Click to expand...
That solution would be fine. The good thing about the TC is that you set it up and forget about it. It just rolls in the background.

In the setup procedure on the TC, there is an option to do a transfer from other types of routers to the TC (settings probably). I didn't try it but you might want to check that out when you get your TC.
 
You mentioned extending the capacity of the TC with an additional 4TB drive in the future. Attaching an external HDD to the Time Capsule won't increase its storage capacity. It shares it as an entirely separate drive on your network.

If you change the target drive of Time Machine to the external, your backup will need to be recreated from scratch.

However, if the new TC is anything like the old TC, it would be possible for you to open it up and replace the internal drive with a larger drive. You can copy the sparsebundle file from the old drive to the new drive and it should allow you to resume your backups on the larger drive.
 
skorpien said:
However, if the new TC is anything like the old TC, it would be possible for you to open it up and replace the internal drive with a larger drive. You can copy the sparsebundle file from the old drive to the new drive and it should allow you to resume your backups on the larger drive.
Click to expand...

That is what I meant, replacing the internal 2TB drive with a 4TB drive in the future.
 
Look into the WD MyBook Live NAS. Supports native time machine (afp) and PCs (smb). Been using a 2TB here for over a year and it works very well. Remote access (via internet) is a bit slow but I really don't use it much. They have various storage options 2TB, 3TB and 6TB raid.

And most important to me is the ability to do safe point backups. In my situation I have a 2TB USB drive connected to my R6300 802.11ac router and I have backups of the NAS automatically done every week.
 
meistervu said:
I have a MBPr, and I am looking to replace my old router. At first was going to get an Asus AC router, but then for it occurs to me that for about $110 more I can get a 2013 Time Capsule to back up my stuffs. It doesn't sound like a bad deal if I look at it that way.

Then I look at the specs: 2TB, USB2, unknown throughput (older ones get 20-30MB/s). Not very impressive on the surface. In my past life I have built hundreds of machines, almost always with bleeding edge components.

But when I really think about it, this TC make sense and the "low" specs don't matter much. I am not looking for a NAS as it would be too slow for my photo library anyway, so USB3 on the TC wouldn't do me much good other than extending the backup capacity. I could probably put a 4TB drive in there when I need to in the future.

So I am leaning toward getting a 2TB TC and a 3TB Buffalo Drive Station DDR for my Lightroom photo library. Any thought?
Click to expand...

The Time Capsule has an internal harddisk that is connected to the motherboard through SATA, not USB.
 
haruhiko said:
The Time Capsule has an internal harddisk that is connected to the motherboard through SATA, not USB.
Click to expand...

Yes, I am aware of that. I was referring to the USB2 port that one can connect an external hd to.
 
Just installed a new TC. Connected the old one using ethernet cable (into wan socket of old TC). This seems very fast, if you are looking for better than usb2 performance.(maybe an ethernet external hd is the way to go)
 
mpainesyd said:
Just installed a new TC. Connected the old one using ethernet cable (into wan socket of old TC). This seems very fast, if you are looking for better than usb2 performance.(maybe an ethernet external hd is the way to go)
Click to expand...

Can you tell us how hot your new TC is getting? The old design never really shook the failure issues it had and I wasn't sure if that was a heat thing or a design problem. The new one has a fan so I'm assuming that apple put it there to ensure the drive doesn't fail due to heat.

I really want the new TC but I'm waiting a month or two to ensure the failure issues from the last gen don't re-surface.
 
^ I picked up a new TC to replace my 1st gen 500GB. The 1st gen did get pretty warm, but I never had any issues. I bought it right when they came out and it still works perfect to this day. The new does not get as hot and the drive isn't as noisy.
 
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