Apple Time Capsule MB277LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 1 TB Storage)
by Apple Computer
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List Price: Our Price: $184.99 You Save: $315.00 (63%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Apple Time Capsule MB277LL/A (AirPort Extreme Plus 1 TB Storage)
Customer Review: problem with latest firmware
Summary: 4 Stars
Great product, but latest firmware had a bug and took me a while to figure out why my mac book pro did not connect at 11n 5GHz. I needed to downgrade to previous firmware works fine now.Customer Review: NIce,easy and convenient.
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a nice product, too bad its not the newer version which allows you to use both bands and create two networks, but it works quite well.Customer Review: Great Product!
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a great product from Apple. Very easy to setup. I am using the airport piece and the hard drive for Time Machine backup on my MBP.Customer Review: Apple Time Capsule
Summary: 4 Stars
Little hard to set up, but once it is going it does the job wellCustomer Review: Not quite as advertised...
Summary: 3 Stars
Got this to serve as network-attached storage and backup for several computers with an existing wireless network. I read some critical reviews, but decided to try it anyway, because the other network attached storage solutions were reputably even harder to administer ([...] or too expensive (Data Robotics DR04DD10 Drobo 4-Bays USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array and Droboshare, Network Attached Companion for Drobo). I didn't consider a USB external drive because I want to be able to access my files from my notebook computer when the one desktop computer we have is asleep or out of sorts.
Here's what I learned after buying it that you should know before:
- Automatic backup is only for Mac machines with Time Machine (a feature of Leopard, which is a $100 upgrade I haven't done yet). For any other machine you have to configure it yourself somehow (there are no instructions for doing this). Also, I haven't been able to get it to work with Windows Vista's automatic backup feature - I get some kind of RPC server error when I try to specify to back up to the TC.
- It can't connect wirelessly to a wireless network that isn't 802.11.n. It kind of says it might work, but when I tried to configure it with my 802.11.g router, it just stopped responding and I had to reset it.
- It won't work with a network that's got less than 128-bit WEP encryption. This is a direct contradiction to something this product description says. Also it requires a 13-character ASCII WEP password, not a hexidecimal password.
- If you use it to access the internet through another router, it "dumbs down" its speed to the speed of that router. Even if I'm just writing files between my Mac and the Time Capsule, it's limited to the speed of the older, non-Apple router.
- Time Capsule supports WPA and WPA2 encryption, but if you use it with Windows machines or another router tech support says you should not try to use WPA because non-Apple equipment might have problems supporting it. WPA is supposedly better than WEP.
- The best scenario is to have it be your only wireless router. Although you can configure it to be a "member" of the network or to "extend your wireless network" if you connect it via Ethernet, Apple tech support discourages that. One tech I talked with said she had a customer who configured it to work with another router and it worked at first but then stopped working for no apparent reason.
- If you have a wireless router from your ISP you might have to reconfigure it (to change the password and encryption strength) and/or turn off the wireless feature to let Time Capsule be the boss.
On the bright side, Apple wireless support was free, easy to get, and helpful. (Except for the part where they kept telling me it probably wouldn't work the way I wanted it to!)
After a few days attempts to configure it, I can mount it as a network drive and it seems to be working (I'm copying 25GB of photos to it now). I haven't tried backing up to it yet, since I haven't researched yet how to do that on Tiger or figured out how to make it work on Windows.
I still think it's a decent price for a network-attached 1TB drive, but unless you have an all-Mac household and it can be your only wireless access point, you will have to do a lot of work on your own to make it do everything you want it to.