Wireless External HD...Time Capsule?

[Bleedcubbieblue]

Hi new to the forums.
Am getting a Retina Macbook and am looking for a wireless external hard drive. I have slower internet speed from AT&T Uverse apparently limited by a really old apartment building and I'm on the 3rd floor. Was wondering if Time Capsule would boost my internet speed as well as be an easy to set up external hard drive solution. If not maybe some other suggestions.

Thanks

 

[eduardrw]

what UVerse speed do you have? What UVerse equipment do you have?

Typically if you have UVerse you have their router. Depending on the gateway model it could be a model which only supports 802.11G which is limited to 54Mbs nominal - but in real world situations you get about 20-30Mbs at best.

Should that be the case a Time Capsule with 802.11a/c supports speeds of up to 30 times faster WIFI.

Just make sure you read up on putting the Time Capsule router in the DMZ of your UVerse gateway. Otherwise you have "double NAT" which leads to al kind of problems and potential slow downs.

The built in Hardrive works well for Time Machine backups of your Laptop. It is also the only Apple supported solution for Time Machine backups.

 

[JTToft]

A Time Capsule will do nothing to improve your internet speed. That's between you and your ISP.

It may, however, improve the speed and reliability of your private wireless network.

 

[Bleedcubbieblue]

Definitely wish I wasn't clueless when it comes to this stuff. I have a Motorola NVG510 router with the UVerse Elite, speeds up to 6 Mbps

Thanks for the help

 

[Altemose]

Definitely wish I wasn't clueless when it comes to this stuff. I have a Motorola NVG510 router with the UVerse Elite, speeds up to 6 Mbps

Thanks for the help

If you are only paying for the 6 Mbps speed then the Time Capsule will do nothing. Now if you were getting 6 Mbps on a 100 Mbps connection over the wireless then it is something different.

 

[eduardrw]

Definitely wish I wasn't clueless when it comes to this stuff. I have a Motorola NVG510 router with the UVerse Elite, speeds up to 6 Mbps

Thanks for the help

Your internet speed will most likely not improve with a different router.

However if you use a Time Capsule with a built in hardisk, the data transfer within you network will be much much faster. (backups etc)

Run speedtest (http://www.speedtest.net) from your laptop via WIFI and you will probably see the 6Mbs as your internet speed. Then run it again connecting via ethernet. If the WIFI speed is significantly lower than the one via ethernet the conclusion would be your WIFI is the bottleneck. Then a Time Capsule could help with the internet speed.

 

[Bleedcubbieblue]

Thanks for the help
I do get 6 Mbps with speed test and I think that's the highest speed I can get through AT&T UVerse. Wondering if cable internet would be different or if it would also be limited by my old apartment building.

So Time Capsule would only offer faster backups. Wondering if it's worth it to pay the premium price fro 2 TB of memory vs. any wireless external hard drive

 

[mic j]

Thanks for the help
I do get 6 Mbps with speed test and I think that's the highest speed I can get through AT&T UVerse. Wondering if cable internet would be different or if it would also be limited by my old apartment building.

So Time Capsule would only offer faster backups. Wondering if it's worth it to pay the premium price fro 2 TB of memory vs. any wireless external hard drive

I would opt for an external drive. I used to have a TC and it's power source finally died, which meant I had to buy a whole new one even though the drive was fine. So I instead, bough a Airport Extreme Base Station and an external drive. That way if one or the other fails, I can swap in out and not pay a premium price. It has been working flawlessly.

Also consider the drive (or partition size) that you really need. I used to have a 1TB TC and my backups when almost a year back. Do you really need to keep stuff that far back? Since then I have gone to an inexpensive 500GB drive. It still goes back about 6 months and frankly, I hardly every look to recover anything over a month old. Just something to consider when deciding how much to spend. You can also do the larger drive and partition it before starting your backups. That way you can use 1 partition for backups and the rest of the drive for storage.

 

[ColdCase]

So Time Capsule would only offer faster backups. Wondering if it's worth it to pay the premium price fro 2 TB of memory vs. any wireless external hard drive

I have a wireless Voyager that works well for photo and file sharing, but wireless drives and time machine is tricky. If you are planning to use the drive as a time machine destination, its best to stick with apple products.

The only time I wanted to go back more than 6 months was when the spouse accidentally deleted her email (no not Hillary). That was a life saver, although I probably could have asked the email service provider to restore them.... but then a couple weeks had passed before she mentioned it