Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage)
by Apple Computer
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Apple Time Capsule MB276LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 500 GB Storage)
Customer Review: Just what I needed
Summary: 5 Stars
Easy to setup, works great, no problems so far. I have a laptop so this works great for a backup. I won't use it as my only backup device, but it is great for daily backupsCustomer Review: Great!
Summary: 5 Stars
All I expected. Make sure you are not trying to use air tunes with it. For that you need an airport express.Customer Review: good service and a great product
Summary: 5 Stars
Made a setup with time capsule and the product is excellent.
Also a very quick delivery
Customer Review: Works well with Time Machine - should be easy to partition
Summary: 4 Stars
I tried to set Time Capsule up quickly in my niece's dorm, but ran out of time. She called 1-800-my-apple and got the wireless router going, but not the printer. I came back a week later and got the printer and an external drive (via a USB hub) going through Time Capsule and Time Machine backing up to Time Capsule. It runs well. Do not hesitate to call Apple Care. Write down your passwords.
I saw that it was possible (using a disc image) to partition the Time Capsule into something other than one giant 500 GB drive. But I was concerned that nobody else would understand what I did, so I did not attempt it. But we are using the 500 GB drive just to back up a Mac Air (80 GB) and a WD Passport external hard drive (150 GB capacity, 30GB used so far), so there is going to be a lot of unused space on the Time Capsule drive for a long time. I guess better too much space than too little. It is an expensive but excellent way to back up a student's Mac Air and external drive.
I wish that Apple made it easy to partition the Time Capsule drive during the installation process.
The Time Capsule drive and the external hard drive attached to it show up under the name of the Time Capsule in the Finder panel on the left side of the screen (in Finder press Go/Computer to see them). They do not automatically appear as icons on the desktop like other drives plugged into the USB port (and, on other Macs, into the firewire ports). The drives do not appear in the panel, only the router name. When you click on the router name, the hard drives attached to the Time Capsule appear. I wish that those hard drives appeared under the router name, like subsidiaries of the router. I suppose that you could make an Alias (which I guess is like a Shortcut in Windows) to put an icon for the drive on the desktop, and I will try that next time I am in that dorm.
The instructions to the Time Capsule are basic. When they let you down, call Apple Care or go online, where there are many threads about the Time Capsule.
To get the printer going, I plugged the printer into the USB hub (that I ran to the USB port on the Time Capsule) and started the whole Time Capsule install process over. It is not a hassle, because the install program remembers all of your passwords and other inputs from the last time you used the install program. Then the printer worked. (Well, I had a hard time finding a driver for an HP LasetJet P1006, but the drive for another 1000 series seemed to work OK. This is after installing the CD that came with the new printer and also downloading a later driver (for OSX) from the HP website. Kinda frustrating...) After pressing Print, the basic HP LaserJet took more time to start printing over the Time Capsule than it took attached directly to the USB port of the Mac Air, but it was not a painfully long time. On the computer in System Preferences/Printers and Faxes you also have to install a new printer (the one attached via Time Capsule) (press the plus sign), even if the same physical printer was already installed when it was attached directly to the Mac Air USB port. You might keep the old printer in System Preferences in case you need to plug the printer back into the computer's USB port some day.
Postscript: Bought it in August '08. The hard drive in the 500GB Time Capsule died in January '09. No idea why. The "only" thing on it was the Time Capsule backup for a MacBook Air. When the hard drive died, the Time Capsule still worked as a wireless router for the internet and the printer. It lost track of the two USB drives chained to it through a non-powered hub. (FYI: One Western Digital MyBook USB 250 GB drive was powered, one WD 250 GB Passport was not powered on its own.) That meant no way to back up with Time Machine except through the one USB port on the Air (that this Time Capsule was used with). Spent 45 minutes or so with an increasingly cranky (but helpful) lady on the phone to AppleCare. Then she transferred me to a polite guy who quickly said the hard drive was almost certainly dead and made a Genius appointment for me. (Both spoke like they were in the USA.) Apple Genius in Pleasanton CA said it was only the second hard drive he had seen fail in a Time Capsule. He would have replaced it on the spot, but we needed the router and internet for school projects that MLK weekend and could not hook up to internet until Tues if we switched Time Capsules that day (due to a different MAC address in a new Time Capsule/router; the MAC address is the "Ethernet ID" number on the Time Capsule). Went to San Francisco Apple store 2 weeks later on Sat eve, they also confirmed the Time Capsule hard drive was dead, but said they would have to order a replacement, could not give a new one from the shelf. I told my sad story and begged and they kindly relented and swapped for a new one on the spot. My niece registered the new MAC address with UC Berkeley on Monday and set up the router on her own, with WEP encryption. We still need to set up the TimeMachine using the Time Capsule hard drive accessed wirelessly, the printer and the movie and music USB hard drives all accessed wirelessly via a USB hub hung off the USB port on the TimeCapsule. Niece loves using the Air unencumbered, but still having all those wireless resources in the dorm. It's a very cool setup when it works, which it did for a semester. The Time Capsule and external hard drives do not need to be visible, so it's not ugly. (They do need air circulation, and they get it on the floor beside the desk.)
August 2010: Still working well two years and two moves later.
Customer Review: Finally - Time Capsule has arrived (albeit a little late)
Summary: 4 Stars
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!