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: FAST, helpful, but not as robust in configuration.
Summary: 4 Stars
Let it be know that yes, I am a snobby Apple user. I am very demanding that my environment be very intuitive but also lets me tweak it at a low level. This router does NOT do that.
The good points of this are obviously the automated backups built into an airport extreme. If you do the math you also find you are getting quite a good deal, as an Airport Extreme router and external HD will run you a bit more than this configuration will. Yes, it does have a deathstar---wait I mean--- Deskstar HD running in it, but the issues surrounding those HD's are pretty much gone. The HD is solid. The value here is an intrinsic one too, it's a less complicated setup.
The backup system is a little quirky because it's not a direct connection to your system but rather a network. This means if you do things like restart, sleep, etc in the middle of a backup it considers this a failed backup and skips until the next designated time (1hr). The initial backup will take forever, this being a network connection you only have so much bandwidth, even with a gigabit network (which is what I have). All the systems in the house (4 clients) took about 12 hours to get the initial done. Subsequently, however, you won't notice the bandwidth getting used. If you're on a wireless, make sure you have an 802.11n device if you're doing backups, it's going to be horrid otherwise. With 4 clients and being post-initial backup I've not noticed a network slowdown or a problem. I try to keep the intervals different for each client so we're not trying to backup more than one system at a time.
The configuration of these routers, however, is a bit strange if you've experienced many other configs. These routers don't configure via a web interface, there's a dedicated client. This brings up a few oddities, because the advanced menus aren't really as intuitive as other routers I've configured in the past. Things like blocking a particular domain aren't even possible (!?!?). Traffic filtering will be odd. The other weird aspect is that I just use plain MAC address filtering to keep people off my network. If they can get past that, they can get past the WAP/2 encryption as well.
The router's speed and stability, however, are unparalleled. Whatever I throw at this router it just stands there and takes it. I somehow suspect its even asking for more, and without a much larger network I don't know what to give it. I have a 16mbps internet connection at home with 1mbps upstream and I have hosted some gargantuan games online, all the while I'll also have my desktop system streaming an HD movie file to the PS3 on another TV while another system is probably doing its backup, I notice no slowdown. This router handles heavy load and it does it like a champ. Other routers have faltered and stuck or reset themselves by this point but this thing just smiles and chugs on through. The only wireless clients is the laptop, the rest can be doing all kinds of heavy loads maxing out their bandwidth to the router and it manages all the traffic just fine. I could not be more impressed.
In short, great router, great backup system, but could use a hand in robust configurability. Otherwise I'd have no complaints whatsoever. If you balk at the price at all, remember, you get what you pay for. If you get this router/backup system it will give you peace of mind and a rock solid router. You can find other rigs, but they won't offer what this does. I guess Ferris Bueller put it succinctly, if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.
Customer Review: Excellent Wireless Router/Hard Drive
Summary: 4 Stars
I have a tendency to read a lot of reviews before I buy a product, but don't generally write them. In this case however, some of the negative reviews on the TC are just killing me so I felt obligated to give you my experience. I had a basic Belkin router for about 3 years and if finally failed, and I have a 300g Maxtor Drive that works excellent but I always have to plug into the USB to back up files. I saw the Time Capsule and thought what a great solution to network the 3 laptops in the house and share my 15,000+ pictures/videos and other files. I also bought the latest new Macbook Pro a few months ago.
When I opened the Time Capsule box I was impressed by the small size and no antennas on it, nice clean seek look like most Apple products. I read the instructions before plugging in the TC, unlike most people, which is why many of them are probably having difficulties.
I have Cable with Comcast so I first hooked up the Ethernet cable to the Ethernet WAN Port on the TC.
I then plugged the TC in and opened up the Airport Utility on my MBP. It simply recognized the TC and I followed the easy setup instructions. Within 10 minutes I was up and running and dragging an dropping files from my MBP to the TC wireless and flawless, just as I hoped to do. I moved about 10G to start and it was smooth. Later that night I decided to move over I a very large chunk of files about 200G. To speed up the process I connected a cable directly to one of Ethernet ports on the TC to my MBP Ethernet port and turned off the wireless Airport. It transferred the data flawlessly again. I was very impressed.
Now here comes the challenge I thought, hooking up my PC laptops to the network. Will they see the TC? (Common complaint in many reviews.)
The directions say to install the CD that came with the TC.
I simply installed it to my HP DV1000 laptop and my wife's HP DV5000 laptop. The CD automatically installed the Airport Utility. I simply went to My Computer after the installation and there it was a new drive.... Drive (Z): Time Capsule under the Network Drives. I clicked on the TC icon it asked for my network password and there you go I could access all the files, read & write, drag and drop... It was that simple.
Only one problem, the problem was when I went to hook up my 300G Maxtor drive to the USB in the back of the TC. The airport utility recognized the drive but I could not access it. The Apple tech support said it needs to be a FAT32 and my Maxtor is formatted in NTFS. I have not reformatted the Maxtor drive yet but I probably will to utilize the drive on the network.
Feel comfortable purchasing the TC if you want a wireless router and network drive combination that you can share files between Macbook Pro and PC's to Time Capsule.
It works excellent.
Customer Review: Learning the hard way
Summary: 4 Stars
I've been a user of Mac osx for 5 years. I bought a Time Capsule recently, and am sharing this experience to save others pain. The device is good; but the user's manual is seriously deficient. Some tech writers are simply too close to the product to be able to see it with new eyes. They assume basics on behalf of a new user which simply are not there. I spent major portions of two days undoing the results of poor communications in the owner's guide for this device.
I bought the machine at the Apple Store in Buffalo, and they helped me set it up. So it seemed it should be a simple matter of taking it home and running it. Well, life is complicated. It turns out that my Intego firewall software was conflicting with the hardware firewall which comprises this device. So back to the store I went. (This was not Apple's fault; but I spent 2.5 hours at the store working with a guy at the genius bar. They're well named.) Nevertheless, the overlap of the firewalls could have been mentioned in the manual. After the genius solved the conflict issue, I went home assuming I would simply be able to plug in the device and live happily ever after.
Not So! And here's where the poor assumptions of the tech writers are to blame. Nowhere in the owner's guide is there a basic startup procedure. (Think of a new car buyer not being told in writing to put the key in the ignition, put your foot on the brake, start it up and put it in gear, before attempting to go anywhere.) These basic operating instructions were entirely missing. As a result, I tried to start up the device in a clumsy fashion, and ran it off the road -- only to have to take it back to the store for another hour of resetting the gizmo's preferences. I'm not a Mac novice. This all could have been avoided with the most basic of instructions. The Time Capsule seems like a great device; but the basics could be covered better. In retrospect, I should have insisted that the genius shut down the entire rig, and let me (no genius) take it out for a spin. This would have saved us both considerable time and effort. We both would have noticed that I had no license to operate this hotrod. Instead, I had to come back the next day to have said genius do his work over.
HINT: start the device from the uppermost toolbar along the top of your screen. (The icon spins slowly.) But first click on the banded arcs shaped as a slice of pie (the airport icon). Select the network to connect to, named during set up -- or found at a local hotspot. Beginning at the beginning is tremendously helpful! (Tinkering with panes that appear on the desktop is not. That's not were the ignition switch will be found.)
~eric.
Customer Review: A guest network is excellent but backups every hour seems a bit strange esp for those who keep much of their work in the cloud
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a convenient product that supports two networks. I leave one network, that I call "guest," unprotected for friends or neighbors who would like to use it -- very nice for visitors who want to pull out their latest wifi gadget w/o having to ask for your password which feels awkward to both parties.
So many people, like myself, have failed to make frequent backups in the past that the TC is a great product since it makes backups with one click. But when I get realistic about how infrequently I used to make backups (once/yr?) why, pray tell would I think it essential to make backups once/hr??? Why can't Apple have provide an update to it's Time Machine software to pick other frequencies, like once per week or month or day? This is especially pertinent for households, like mine, with multiple computers to back up. So ... I resort to clicking "Back UP Now" whenever I want -- the effort required is miniscule -- the button is easily accessible (on my Mac OS 10.6). But what if I forget to back up when, in retrospect, I "should have"? I reckon that's possible but I'm so aware of the convenience and location of that "Back Up Now" button that it's not a worry of mine especially since so many of my important files (other than music) are stored w/o charge "in the cloud."
In addition to the guest network what I like most about the TC is the ability to occasionally reach back in time to find a file that I later regret having deleted. I would not be able to go back very far in time on a half TB drive (while backing up large histories in my browsers) if I were conforming to Apple's notion that I "should be" backing up every hour -- which seems insane unless I were running a business with new critical information constantly going into my hard drive every hour.
When you set TC up from a particular account on your computer, it backs up THAT account but not any other account!!
I keep multiple accounts because I sync different combinations of music and photos to different ipods & an iphone. I keep ALL my music, photos, slideshows and videos in a primary account but links (which take a trivial amount of space) to those subsets in other accounts. So ... I use Time Machine from each account to perform backups of those accounts. I don't need redundant backups of my music, photos, etc but I do need the unique iTune configurations for the different devices that I sync.
It's a very sweet experience to go back in time and restore an old file -- the craftsmanship in the graphical-user-interface is beautiful.
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.