Time Capsule vs NAS

[JesseW6889]

I need a NAS that I can connect to wirelessly. I assume I can get a regular ethernet one and plug it into my wireless router and it will wirelessly acessable?

I want to use it for file storage as well as time machine, do time capsules let you use them for file storage as well?

I figure I can find a cheaper NAS than a time capsule, but I don't know which I should get, cheaper is definitely better, especially if there is an enclosure I can add my own hard drive to.

 

[kurtster]

The Time Capsule is just an NAS with a built-in wireless router, so to answer your first question, yes, you could just get a plain vanilla NAS and connect it to your own router.

Yes, you can use the Time Capsule for normal file storage as well as for back-up via Time Machine. That's how I use mine.

I don't know how much cheaper a non-Apple NAS, but I do know you can find NAS bigger than 2TB. For example, Buffalo makes a 4TB model.

 

[littleheaven]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)

I have a Netgear Stora which I use to store my media files and stream wirelessly to my PS3. Works great, though I've not tried using it for Time Machine backups - those go to a dedicated external drive.