Home > Consumer Reviews > Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage)

I've been using Time Machine since I upgraded to Leopard. While Time Machine is great for backing up my iMac, its a pain to have to hook up my Mac Book Pro and new Mac Book Air to an external hard drive. The Time Capsule is great for that. So long as my laptop is open and running, a backup can happen.

Make sure you remember to do your first backup using ethernet. Otherwise it is going to be slow. Apple does not want to bog down your network with backups, so when you are backing up wirelessly, it will intentionally throttle the connection sped.

This device also functions as a wireless router. I was able to remove my previous Air Port Extreme from the network. The large size is nice because you are able to share one large drive and backup several smaller computers. My iMac and laptop all backup just fine.

The device does run a little hot. The Best Way to Backup a Mac Laptop

I'll make this short... I just got my 500GB Time Capsule and, so far, it's been an absolutely outstanding experience. I was already on a wireless network and was a little confused about how well this thing would go in. So, followed the simple instructions that came with the AirPort Setup Utility and, voila, I was talking to the Time Capsule (TC). I decided to stand the TC up as a separate, Apple only wireless network, and to connect (specifically, bridge vs. Double DHCP) the TC up to my existing router. The installation took about five minutes and was absolutely flawless (I now have an Apple-only 802.11n network, and my original 802.11g network for guests). Oh, and did I say the 802.11n wireless is bloody FAST?!

As soon as I specified the TC as my Time Machine backup server, two minutes later the initial backup was cranking away. No false starts, no crazy configuration management or Regedit blah blah blah -- I plugged it in, gave it a couple of key data points, and it was up and working!

Only gripe I have is that I couldn't migrate my existing Time Machine backups to the new TC -- a minor inconvenience, but one I can live with...

THIS is the reason that I buy and use Apple products. I am exceptionally happy with this purchase. Three thumbs up!

Update 2008-03-20: I had some limited drop-outs of the wireless, but it wasn't a "killer" issue. Last night, Apple issued a Time Capsule update, and I'm happy to report the service has been absolutely flawless, and bloody fast -- the wireless function feels like it is orders of magnitude faster than before... Again, this has been an excellent experience, and I'll be purchasing my second Time Capsule for my daughter in the next couple of weeks.

Since its introduction in January, Mac users (new and old) have been waiting patiently for Time Capsules (TC) to start appearing in retail stores. For me - I got lucky and wandered into the Apple Store on Friday to find that they had actually materialized earlier in the day.

Getting the product installed into my home network was a little more difficult than I expected, but not terribly so. For me - the hang up was that I was not going to use the Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) to share out my Internet connection. My goal was simply to turn this device into another client on my Cat6 home network. After installing the AirPort utility provided with the packaging onto my MacBook Pro, configuring Time Capsule to recognize itself as a NAS only device was fairly straightforward. For at least the beginning, I disabled the wireless radio and plugged it in via one of its 4 available Cat6 connections. Opening config stuff was fairly standard: 1) give the device a name, decide on DHCP or manual IP config, etc. The only slightly annoying thing is that the Airport Utility does like to reset/reboot the Time Capsule after you make almost any type of change to the configuration. Mine must have rebooted 8 times before I had made the last of my changes.

As far as the integration with Time Machine, it was very intuitive and straight forward. The only curious thing is that it will not let me change my TM preferences unless my laptop was plugged in. Strangely, I could perform an instant backup with the laptop running on battery power. As many people have wondered, you can attach another USB-based hard-drive to the TC and use that drive(s) as the source of the TM backups if you like. Doing so would essentially make the entire size of TC available as traditional NAS Storage. Plugged in via my Ethernet connection, the initial TM backup of my 160GG (40 GB used) hard-drive took about 2.5 hours. I assume the speed would be significantly reduced if I was using the wireless. It looks as though Apple creates a sparse disk image bundle on the Time Capsule and then mounts that during a TM operation. This essentially leaves one file on the root of the hard drive after the initial backup is performed. You can mount this image at any time, and you will observe a folder structure similar to when Time Machine is operating against a locally attached USB hard drive.

Next the Wireless: After getting TM working to my satisfaction, I wanted to see if I set up another wireless network in my house. As with other AEBS units, this was very simple to do. I simply chose to put my TC into "Bridge Mode" and away I was. With 2 minutes I had a second wireless network up and running. For curiosity sake I setup the network to operate on the 5G Hz 802.11n configuration. I was curious to see how much faster the speed was than if I configured it to be backward compatible with 802.11a/b/g. Not surprisingly, performance on the "N" network was much better. I achieved average file transfers of almost twice the speed as I would have seen if I had been connected to my 802.11g network. Once I unplugged the Ethernet cable and went totally wireless, my Time Machine backups were very seamless and after a few hours of work, I stopped noticing the backups actually taking place.

Aesthetics: Like the AppleTV, the Time Capsule device does get fairly hot to the touch. From a size comparison, it is a little bit bigger (height-wise) than the AppleTV. It does not however have the smooth edges that the AppleTV sports. For some reason, its exterior design is more reminiscent of the last generation of AEBS.

Overall, Time Capsule is a great consumer device; but I have to believe that many power Mac users would cite SuperDuper's (http://www.shirt-pocket.com) ability to perform backups to image files stored on a network share as a comparable feature set in a backup solution. Interestingly, I am using both backup strategies: Time Machine & Time Capsule to protect the incremental versions of my everyday files and SuperDuper to generate a weekly backup image of my entire hard drive. My last comment would be this: a 500GB TC unit should be more than sufficient to take care of any single MacBook or MacBook Pro archiving strategy. If however you are looking to service multiple Macs or work with large amounts of video across the network, then the 1TB version will definitely be the way to go. Enjoy!

I tried this Time Capsule out for about 25 days and, in that time, observed several key flaws that ultimately led to my return of the item. While the routing functions worked flawlessly for my application, the internal drive did not. Using a gigabit connection, the maximum throughput to and from the drive was dismal at around 8MB/s and 15MB/s, respectively. More importantly, as a primary backup device, the drive became corrupted on two occasions requiring a reformat each time. As the drive cannot be connected directly to my MacBook by USB, I could not use disk-utility to repair the drive and potentially save the data on it. An Airport Extreme with a 500GB USB drive attached was able to attain a throughput of 10MB/s and 19MB/s, respectively.

I am not disappointed with the Time Capsule, but am disappointed with some of the consequences associated with having it. First, let me say that it offers a lot more customization than most people are willing to admit. The network settings and ability to customize your network are just as good if not better than every other router I have owned.
-The USB sharing works like a champ. I am currently sharing two hard drives and a printer from the USB port. I don't like that the drives won't mount to the desktop, but rather just show up like a shared folder. It works though, so I have no real complaint.
-Time Machine works well, although you can't transfer a hard drive with an existing TM backup to the Time Capsule. You have to format and start over, which sucks.
-The TC is a bit noisy, but no more than the quietest hard drives I have used. It is definitely not as noisy as a Lacie or similar.
-As of right now, I cannot connect my XBOX 360 to the TC. I suspect that this is a flaw in the XBOX wireless adapter, and not in TC. I will try hooking up an old router in bridge mode and see if I can get it to work that way. I have also heard that there is a Linksys Wireless-N Gaming Adapter that works both with XBOX and with Airport Extreme
-It is a bit large, but looks great. I have heard others say it gets hot, but mine hasn't become anything more than warm.
-I have experienced what others say is slow performance, but I have been told that the Time Capsule regulates network traffic depending what it is, which usually only applies to Time Machine. It won't allow Time Machine backups slow down your network, which I like. I haven't confirmed whether this causes problems with media and other files, but I did notice that certain files were accessed faster than some, and it seemed to back up the claim regarding network control. If that makes sense...

Overall, I think it is a great deal, and I would recommend it to anyone that needs NAS and a solid router.

**UPDATE: I have solved the XBOX problem. Read the comments to see how.