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: Pretty white brick with a blinking light
Summary: 2 Stars
The time capsule is a great idea, and I'm very much looking forward to someone turning it into a working product. At the moment it seems that Apple has failed to do this.
First I tried to get it to back up my laptop wirelessly. So far it has not succeeded in doing this at all. It spent a lot of time copying things off my computer but didn't complete for some reason.
There was an issue of my wireless menu saying "not configured" which I resolved by going to system preferences | networking and clicking the minus button until all items went away. Then I clicked plus and added back ethernet and wireless. That fixed the wireless menu, which seems to have been broken by the installation of the Time Capsule software.
When I connected it to my cable modem it did not get the DHCP settings, so I could not use it as a wireless router. I tried holding the reset button for 5 seconds to restore factory settings, then entered my settings again but that did not work. I tried unplugging it and plugging it back in while holding the reset button as suggested in the manual, but that also had no effect.
After all that, I put the Time Capsule back in its box and dug out my old Netgear WPN824 wireless router, and set it up in maybe ten minutes. It works great. Of course it doesn't back up my data, which is too bad.
I am going to return the Time Capsule for a refund. It is disappointing because I spent the extra money thinking it would save me time and help me make regular backups, but it didn't.
Customer Review: Mediocre product
Summary: 1 Stars
It doesn't belong to the lineup of Apple products.
Never try to use it as a client of your wirelees network. Even if you have an "n standart" router you'll have a hard time establishing the internet connection. Once you succeed you could spend 2 solid days (48 hours )to initially backup a 60GB drive with time machine, even if you hard wired the capsule to the computer. I experienced 8 connection drops on a wireless mode after everything was setup and this delayed the incremental backups.
Don't forget to set your hard drive to be on all the time . If it goes to sleep you won't backup anything until you operate the computer again.
Now if you use the time capsule as a primary wireless router then be prepared to have a very slow connection beyond 30 feet(below g speed). So it is a poor experience at that.
Of course I won't go into the disaster scenario i.e. the router goes bad or most likely the hard drive does and then you are out of luck : No router and no backup unless you had mirrored time capsule unto another external drive.
Conclusion: I returned mine and went with the new Netgear readynas duo. For $500 you get 1 TB of a well designed NAS storage. More on that separately.
To finish, forget about seeking Apple technical support. When thay cannot help you then " you must have another faulty piece of equipment in your network" . Let alone that my sytem worked like a charm before time capsule was attached, and after I eliminated it from the network. Of course it is never Apple's fault!
Customer Review: The Time is not right for Time Capsule yet
Summary: 1 Stars
First, I'm a hardcore Apple fan and have used Macs from the LC days (last century!), so don't get me wrong on this.
I regret my purchase of Time Capsule. Seriously. And if I had a way of returning it (I'm 12,563 km away from the NY Apple Store where it was purchased), I would.
The TC's size is LARGE, larger than the footprint (Al base) of an iMac 20", and it's heavy. Given today's HD form factors, I was expecting something much smaller. In fact, look at how Apple has shrunk the new Aiport Extreme base stations.
Setup with Leopard and Time Machine isn't difficult, but it's not the fabled Apple kind of easy. WiFi and internet were up after a couple of attempts and one hardware reset. The initial backup... ah! there lies the rub...
I did it the logical ethernet way (Apple should have warned newbies about this), and believe me, I would not like to repeat the process. 1st attempt: 24 hours+, and a defective backup (for only 80 GB!); 2nd attempt (after firmware upgrade, sw update), 6 hours, with quite a few hitches in between.
Conceptually the Time Capsule is a good product; wifi backup, and Airport base station. But perhaps Apple should have warned about how long backups are going to take via Ethernet or Wifi (people are reporting 24 hours plus). That effectively means that your Mac or MacBook is tethered to your Time Capsule for that length of time.
Perhaps you'd like to sleep over it before you buy one.
Customer Review: Works, but:
Summary: 4 Stars
It's easy, wireless backup of all your Macs running Leopard. Yep. My only complaints are with speed - you may be able to convince me this is because it's taking it's time making sure the backup is done properly. Whatever. Anyway, I would certainly recommend this to people running multiple Macs. The good and bad:
Pros:
EASY - I followed the default settings from the setup assistant and was up and running in 5 minutes.
Syncing with my Apple TV and copying files via "n" wireless was great, about 9MB/sec. My "g" router was about 2.6MB/sec.
Cons:
Some Speed issues -
File copying via gigabit Ethernet was slow too - 12MB/sec through Time Capsule vs 25MB/sec when my MacBook was directly connected to my Mac Pro.
Backups via gigabit Ethernet were slow to - about 5 MB/sec. Maybe the Time Capsule was doing other things to ensure my backup was properly done, don't know.
Wireless backups from laptops do work except I was disappointed to discover it only backs up when the laptop is plugged in. Not a deal breaker, but a disappointment.
Apple recommends you let the first backup run uninterrupted. Something hard for me to do because I like to fiddle with it as it's running. But it did work as expected, just slower than expected.
It's still the easiest and best backup tool out there. Just do it. (I bought the 1 TB model)
Customer Review: Not Apple's finest
Summary: 2 Stars
Setting up the Time Capsule has been my most frustrating user experience ever with an Apple product. I had an existing Apple Airport wireless network, with a base station and two Airport Express modules to extend coverage through the house and play iTunes music through the stereo. Without going into all the gory details, I simply could not get the Time Machine to integrate wirelessly with the existing Airport network. Many evening and weekend hours were wasted trying different configurations, resetting to factory defaults, restarting the cable modem, to no avail -- if I got the backup running, I would lose Internet access; if I got music working, the backup wouldn't connect. It was hell, and from reading the discussion boards, many others have had the same frustrations.
In the end, I only got it to work by turning off the wireless functionality on the Time Capsule and physically connecting it to the original base station with an ethernet cable, effectively turning it into nothing more than a hard disk. It's an expensive hard disk, and when you can only make a product work by turning off half of its key features, it can hardly be described as a success.
Now that it's running, the automated backup is wonderful, but that is a result of the Time Machine software, which deserves 5 stars. For me, the Time Capsule hardware is a big disappointment.