Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage)
by Apple Computer
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List Price: Our Price: $169.99 You Save: $129.01 (43%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage)
Customer Review: This is a keeper!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I've got to admit, I had quite a few reservations about ordering the Time Capsule... The experiences I had with my late, unlamented AirPort Extreme (mostly bad) caused me to hesitate more than a few times before clicking on the button to finalize the sale. As a parenthetical note, I got one of the first Time Capsules, as I had pre-ordered through the Apple online store. When I received the Time Capsule (on a Tuesday), I waited until the following Saturday to begin the set up process, believing that I would need a full day to work all the bugs out of the network...
In the end, I could have set the Time Capsule up on a long coffee break from work, including the commute back and forth! All I had to do was download the latest version of the AirPort Utility, plug it up to power and the cable modem and run the set-up wizard. Within 5 minutes, my Macbook Pro was on the network at a jaw-dropping 144 mbps connection speed. Another 10 minutes and I had a Windows-based dinosaur personal laptop, my work laptop, three Win desktops, my Wii and the wife's Mac Mini connected wirelessly. The Time Capsule has run flawlessly since late February without a single dropped connection. The reliability of the Time Capsule has been stellar, and in a household with two avid online gamers and a technology-adverse spouse who is constantly shopping online, I would have immediately been informed of any issues. Using my MacBook Pro, connected wirelessly, I can achieve an astonishing 20 mbps download speed on a regular basis through my ISP, which is exactly what I can achieve when I check using my Core 2 Quad QX9770-based machine through a wired connection. I've got the Mini and the MacBook Pro both using the HDD of the Time Capsule for Time Machine back-ups without a hitch, as well as having an additional 750GB shared drive and a shared printer on the network.
Yes, the first time you initiate a Time Machine backup, it's going to be dreadfully slow. A slow initial backup is not the fault of the Time Capsule and, according to Apple product message boards should be done hard-wired in any case. That said, the Time Capsule/Time Machine combination has saved my virtual bacon on two occasions where I flubbed a software installation and had to slick the HDD and reinstall Leopard.
This is one concept that Apple has certainly delivered!
Customer Review: Good, but not great
Summary: 4 Stars
I replaced an aging Linksys WRT54GL with this, since now I have a MBP and could use the backup features built in Leopard. Also, wireless N speeds would be a nice upgrade since I stream a lot of content between computers at home.
First the main purpose: backup. I did the first backup wired and all subsequent backups are over the air. No problems here, everything is running fine, I had 0 problems. I went from a scheduled weekly backup of only a few important files on a 4 GB thumb drive to this fully automated, worry-free solution. Great leap forward for me, so if backup is your motivation on buying a Time Capsule, go for it.
Now about the rest of the router functions, I'll be honest: I could use a few more controls and settings. My old Linksys was running custom firmware (DD-WRT), so maybe I was used to having *a lot* of available settings to almost none. Ok, I really don't need *all* the features I had with the Linksys, but I wish I had these:
- QoS: that's a must have for VoIP such as Skype
- better UPnP: some apps have trouble opening ports with this router
- local DNS server: I access some local windows machines using MS Remote Desktop, but now I have to know the machine IP instead of only its name (SMB shares are ok, though)
I was aware I wouldn't have the above listed features and I know that most people probably won't ever need any of them. It's an Apple product, simplicity is one of its keys, but I wish it had at least the QoS. Maybe in a firmware upgrade Apple will add this functionality?
Also, wireless N is not working that well for me. Sure it's faster, but I'm having a few issues, the worst being streaming movies from one computer to the other having a few random jumps and skips, which I never had using wireless G. I'm trying to track down the causes, but I suspect it's related to Time Machine's hourly backups, maybe the network gets hogged while doing both things at the same time. I can't tell about the extended range since my previous router already had a great range and I didn't had any blind spots at home.
So, it's a nice router? Yes, a simple one, but sure it is, and I'm satisfied with it. Be aware of its strengths and limitations before buying it and I'm sure you won't be disappointed.
Customer Review: Great router, good backup device, ok network disk
Summary: 4 Stars
This product is basically three products: an airport extreme wireless router, a networked drive, and finally, with Leopard, a networked backup system. Overall, it's a very good product, but there are some serious limitation one should be aware of.
As a router, it is fantastic. Typical Apple ease of use, with all configuration done by a very intuitive GUI application.
Unfortunately, it's not a great network drive. The drive appears to be internally connected using a very slow USB connection. You will find that even with a computer connected via Gb/s ethernet, transfer speeds will be limited to around 5-6 MB/s, tops. If you connect two Macs via fast ethernet, you can often get over 40 MB/s transfer speeds, so this is a rather large disappointment, especially for a device which will be getting a lot of use if you use Time Machine.
Time Machine is great in theory, but has a few issues. First, it is a file-based differential backup. That means if even a single bit of a 1 GB file is changed, the ENTIRE file gets backed up. Not only does this take a lot of time, it quickly depletes your backup drive because the same data is added to the disk every regular backup. To get around this, you have to explicitly exclude backing up such files. Good candidates for exclusion are Mail and iDisk caches, as well as virtual machine disk images.
There have also been numerous reports of Time Machine backups being susceptible to corruption. I've experienced this once, myself, after a backup was cancelled, so I can vouch that it happens. However, the problems can often be fixed by deleting the last backup. The next backup will take a long time as the computer must scan the full disk again, but the backups then continue on normally after that.
Time Machine backups have their place, and come in very handy to recover accidentally deleted files. However, they should only be considered part of a larger backup scheme. They probably shouldn't be trusted for a full recovery, and won't be of any help if your computer's drive completely fails, anyway. (How are you going to run Time Machine if you can't boot your computer?) As such, you should image your entire drive regularly, in addition to using Time Machine.
Customer Review: Not Up To Apple Standards
Summary: 2 Stars
I have to agree with some of the 1 star reviews, particularly the one calling this a "brutal" product. I, too, have several Apple devices, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhone 3g, and 3 iPods. Like the others, it comes in very stylish packaging, and looks great sitting on a desk. But you don't buy equipment for the box, you buy it because it works well. The Time Capsule doesn't. Its main purpose, in addition to being a router with wireless 802.11n capability is to be a backup device for your computer(s). In this respect it fails miserably.
When getting a backup device, one usually wants something that works easily, reliably and seamlessly, so it is actually used and will be there in the event it is needed when a computer fails or loses data. This device does none of these things like it is supposed to.
Even when it is working, it seems to back up the same things over and over intil the disk is full. For some reason it doesn't seem to want to do incremental backups. It doesn't warn you when it is full like it's supposed to, unless I missed some setting in its too lacking interface.
Once it connects to a machine, it doesn't like it if you change something on the computer and wants you to eliminate all reference to the computer to do a different backup.
I was able to use the USB port to hook up a printer for anyone on the network to use, but was never able to get it to print from a Windows XP PC using Bonjour like it should.
So now I have a relatively expensive NAS and router that I would never have bought if I knew how poorly it worked. It also seems very warm to the touch, which leads me to believe that it is not very ecology friendly.
My recommendation is, if you need a good backup, buy a cheaper NAS and some decent software to do the job.
I did give it 2 stars since it will work, just not very well, but consider it rounded up from 1.5 stars.
I am not happy with this purchase.
disclaimer: This is one of the few items I have reviewed on Amazon that I did not actually purchase from Amazon.com (I bought it from Apple to get the education discount). Even on sale Amazon doesn't give you much of a discount on Apple products.
Customer Review: Do your homework first,then buy.........
Summary: 4 Stars
I had lots of problems setting the Time Capsule up,although most of the problems were my own misunderstanding of the Time Capsule's capabilities.
First,my DSL router from my ISP(Qwest) was getting in the way and not allowing the Time Capsule to set up...Apple phone support identified the problem and we changed some settings in Airport Utility and I was on line.
Second,T.C. could not see my printer through USB connection.........Apple phone support found the needed drivers for my printer,sent them to me and now I've got the printer working,but........
Third,the printer works fine but it's an all in one and it won't scan.....Apple phone support concludes that scanning from an all in one is not possible with any brand printer,but I need that capability so I hard wired the printer to the computer.........
Forth,I plug an external hard drive into the USB outlet on Time Capsule in hope of using it to wirelessly back up my Macbook Pro,but the existing backup can't be seen by my iMac or the Macbook Pro.......Apple phone support claim that some hard drives won't work with Time
I can't except this so I book a session at the genius bar at the local Apple store and within a few minutes the genius concludes that the existing Time Machine backup of the Mackook Pro won't work and the external needs to be erased and backed up with Time Machine through the Time Capsule.This worked and the Apple phone support was wrong.You see a back up on the time capsule creates a backup called a sparsebundle which is a password protected network backup not found when you connect an external to the computer the regular wired way.I hope from reading this you will have a better understanding of the difference between a wired and wireless backup. Now the iMac is backed up through Time Capsule and the Macbook Pro is backed up through the external that is connected to the Time Capsule.I deducted one star from my rating because of the inability to scan from an all in one printer.
So,even with all that I would recommend it because I was able to add the storage I needed and it is all done wirelessly and eliminating wires is always a good thing to me.